Think Stuff Unwanted: A History of Tabloid Newspapers in England

By Dr Richard Rooney

Unpublished manuscript. 1999.

The Daily Mirror was the first truly tabloid newspaper in Britain.

In 1934, the paper relaunched shedding its middle-of-the-road, middle-class, readership

in favour of a mass-audience of (mainly) working-class readers.

The Mirror changed the shape of British journalism. The look of the news became more
important than the news itself, content was over-simplified, 'news' relied more on the
trivial, the sordid and the sensational. The paper built its circulation by filling the paper
with items of maximum interest to the maximum number of people.

The Mirror relaunch represented a significant shift in the way mass-circulation

newspapers packaged the news and from that date British newspapers were never going
to be quite the same again.

This paper outlines the history of tabloid national newspapers in Britain, examining the
state of popular newspaper journalism before the Mirror's relaunch and setting in
context the developments since.

It traces a number of themes: the changes in emphasis in news which placed human-
interest, the unusual and the sensational at the centre of editorial agendas; the search for
mass-circulation with the resulting intense competition among titles and the
developments in technology which made newspapers the preserve of large companies.

Early History

By most accounts regular English journalism began with the Civil War and emerged
during the seventeenth century. The journalism did not necessarily take the form of
newspapers, rather a wide range of publications existed. Among these were small
pamphlets (actually called newsbooks) which appeared from about 1620. Publication
was often erratic, but by the middle of the century many features associated with the
modern newspaper began to appear: the leading article, advertisements and advice to
readers.1

Broadside ballads, sold as single sheets, and newsbooks were packed with tales that
would not seem out of place in today's tabloids: strange and wonderful happenings,
murders, natural disasters and unusual births and omens.2

Murders were covered in detail; readers' fantasies were catered for in lavish descriptions
of events like Royal weddings. News reports dwelt on the details because the events
described were more extravagant and magnificent than anything else in their readers'
experience. Much of the material in these sheets was drawn straight from oral tradition
or relied on word-of-mouth reports, stressing sources as 'eye-witnesses', the 'insiders' of
today.
One characteristic of the seventeenth century ballad books was their moralising tones.
Murderers were seen to repent and their subsequent execution was told in loving detail.
Some early forms of popular newspaper were simply single printed sheets: while these
gave topical items in prose, the broadside ballads would give news in verse.

Newspapers aimed at a mass audience developed first in the United States. These were
later to have a strong impact on tabloid journalism in Britain. The New York Sun was
founded in 1833, aiming for the first time at a mass market. The Penny Press sold for
one cent rather than the six cents cover price typical for newspapers of the time.

The Penny Press of New York targeted a growing mass of semiliterate urbanites with
their human-interest stories. Their style (rather than subject mater) was sensational. The
writing style and tone of the Penny Press papers were based on the language of the
common man. Their aim was to tell a good human-interest story, appealing to readers'
feelings as much as to their intellect, this style was adopted by the English press at the
turn of the century.

The New York Sun evolved a simpler, more direct news style, using vivid, active
language and colloquialisms and breaking up stories into more manageable paragraphs.
The short, clear, active style became the model for US journalism from then on.

The US Penny Press began using reporting techniques that later became standard
journalistic practice, this included the observation of the reporter and the interview and
placing the most important part of the story in the first paragraph (the British press did
not adopt this style until the 1930s).

So, by the end of the nineteenth century newspapers replaced chapbooks and ballads.
The human-interest story was central in mass-market newspapers - an influence that
would soon travel to Britain.

The early Sunday newspapers

In England chapbooks and ballads were also important means of communicating news.
The early Sunday papers adopted some of their tones and began the long path towards
the form of tabloid newspaper we know today.

The first Sunday newspaper in England appears to have been the Mrs E Johnson's
3
Sunday Monitor and British Gazette launched in 1779. It was published even though
all Sunday papers were technically illegal due to legislation banning people from
working on the Sabbath.4 The British Gazette looked like any daily of the period
except that the first column of the first page provided religious instruction. But Sundays
at this time were not devoted substantially to religious topics.5

A series of Sundays were founded in the 1780s and 1790s including the Sunday
Reformer, Observer, Bell's Weekly Messenger and Weekly Register. Most contained a
moral essay of some sort, general news and 'instruction and entertainment'.6

Newspapers of this time tried to attract readers with a wide range of fare to include
public occurrences, memorable actions, matters of state, trade, arts and sciences.7 Bell's
Weekly Messenger said it also intended to give 'an innocent amusement to the fair sex
and to improve their knowledge'. (3 January 1802.)

Sunday newspapers were experimenting and after a slow start they caught on. Bell's
Weekly Messenger sold 6,000 copies per week in 1803. By 1812, at least 18 Sundays
were published in London with individual sales of 1,000 to 12,000 copies.

But Sunday newspapers faced opposition. The sale of anything other than milk or
mackerel on a Sunday was against the law. Parliament debated the possibility of
banning Sunday newspapers in 1799, but a Bill for suppression failed. One speaker in
the debate pointed out that if you prevented people working on Sundays, Monday
newspapers would have to be banned as well.

But the attempt to ban Sunday newspapers continued. In 1820 campaigners claimed
Sunday newspapers were 'injurious to public morals' as they employed people on the
Sabbath and stopped people from attending divine service. But these Sundays were also
criticised for the blasphemy and sedition they carried. They were seen as a threat to the
'respectable' press. (Morning Post, 27 May 1820).

But the 'respectable' press was not all that respectable. The coverage of one particular
Royal scandal helped to define the characteristics of many newspapers in 1820. The so-
called Queen's Affair in which King George IV wanted to divorce Queen Caroline who
stood accused of adultery. A trial took place in London that would deprive Caroline of
her title.

Critics said the newspapers had ceased to be newspapers at all. They had become
scandal sheets, devoting page after page, and often entire issues, to the trial, so that
readers could wallow at length in hitherto unplumbed depths of obscenity and
scurrility.8 Among the published details were descriptions of Caroline and her principal
lover Begami and testimony from chambermaids as to the stains on bed sheets after the
pair had made love.

The Caroline crisis caused a boom in circulations of the press as a whole, including
mainstream newspapers that supported the government.

The Radical Press

A quite separate type of newspaper existed alongside the more formal commercial
press. This Radical or Pauper Press thrived for a short time in the early 19th century
when weekly papers were produced by working-class people for the working class. This
was to be the only period in history when a truly working-class press existed.

These newspapers had politics rather than news at their centre and they tried to mould
events rather than report them.9 Journalists on the Radical Press tended to see
themselves as activists rather than professionals and many were organisers for the
National Union of the Working-classes or the Chartists Movement.10

The popular radical press was written in everyday language, with colour, vitality and
force; very often without the restraints and qualifications of highly educated writing. It
is a style that was to became the staple of commercial popular journalism, which used
every device of language and layout to attract attention quickly.11
The British government was convinced that the Press had played an important part in
encouraging the conditions which lead to the French Revolution and believed writers
were capable of setting the masses at war with their rulers.

In an attempt to suppress the Radical Press the government extended the Stamp acts. In
order to publish legally newspaper owners had to collect a tax on each copy they sold.
In 1789 this stamp duty was 2d, by 1815 it was 4d. Advertising duty was also charged.
In 1789 it was 3s per advertisement and 3s 6d in 1815.

Lord Ellenborough, explaining the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act of 1819, said that 'it
was not against the respectable Press that this Bill was directed, but against the pauper
press'.12 The intention of the Act was to make newspapers too expensive for ordinary
working people to afford. This would in turn make newspapers that supported political
change economically untenable.

Because Radical papers were expensive many people, often at coffee shops, barbers or
alehouses would read one copy. This communal reading increased the agitational affect
of the papers. Even the illiterates were able to learn by having the papers read aloud at
meetings.

The rights of the free press were won over a 15-year period from 1819. The authorities
for producing illegal unstamped newspapers persecuted a number of publishers.13 The
Radical Press struggled under the weight of government persecution, in 1817 alone
there were 26 prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel and between 1792 and
1836 about 500 people were prosecuted for the production and sale of unstamped
papers.

Widespread evasion of the stamp duty in the early 1830s caused press regulation to
become a major political issue.14 Parliament decided that the duty had become
unenforceable in the face of mass resistance and should be repealed.

Radical newspapers were able to publish because in the early 19th century it was
possible to launch a newspaper with small capital (the Northern Star in 1837 was
launched on a capital of £690) and newspapers could survive with small circulations
(the Poor Man's Guardian broke-even in the 1830s on a circulation of 2,500). Running
costs of the Radical Press were also low. Even after 1836 when a penny stamp duty had
to be paid on each copy the running costs of the London Dispatch were estimated to be
only £6 per week. The Radical Press relied on cheap and often unpaid labour in the
writing, printing and selling of the papers.

Because publishing costs were low the ownership and control of newspapers could be in
the hands of people committed to the working class. The technology of the newspaper
was still relatively undeveloped. The real expansion of newspaper readership came with
technical developments.15 In 1814 the Times introduced steam printing and became the
dominant daily newspaper of its age. From this time it became increasingly necessary to
have large amounts of capital to launch a newspaper.

Commercialism and the importance of capital

It was this change in the economics of newspaper production that contributed to the
demise of the Radical Press. The lifting of press taxes resulted in an enormous demand
for cheap newspapers and this in turn lead to the development of expensive new print
technology.

A more important financial consequence of the repeal of press taxes was to force up the
running costs of newspaper publishing. National newspapers became substantial
enterprises with large staffs and long print runs. Newspapers also cut their cover prices
so the combination of lower cover prices and higher expenditure forced up the
circulation level which newspapers had to achieve in order to be profitable. This in turn
raised the run-in costs of new newspapers before they built their circulations to break-
even point.

This increase in capital investment made it much more difficult for people with limited
funds to break into mass publishing. It also gave economic advantage to newspaper
groups that printed more than one paper at the same plant.

Advertising played a crucial part in the new system. After advertising duty was cut and
eventually abolished the volume of press advertising rose (between 1836 and 1848 by
36 per cent). It became possible to advertise a new range of goods and these adverts
were placed in popular newspapers. In time newspapers and advertising became
inextricably linked. Gradually newspapers came to accommodate themselves to the new
situation in which advertising regulated the whole shape, size and design of the product.
The political and opinion forming functions of newspapers shrivelled as its economic
functions grew. Newspapers once saw themselves as a medium competing for the
attention of voting groups and interest groups, now they have come to concentrate on
making themselves indispensable to the consumers of goods.16

Politics was no longer to be the primary source of news for newspapers as they
diversified seeking different levels of seriousness. A lighter style of reporting developed
and politics and opinion started to be supplemented with material of a 'human note',
crime, sexual violence and human oddities. The press saw its role to entertain as well as
inform its readers.17 After the stamp duty repeal more newspapers appeared. The Daily
Telegraph was launched in 1855 for 'the man on the knifeboard of the omnibus'. It sold
for one penny and thought readers were interested in more than politics, so gave them a
diet of crime, sex and human interest. Matthew Arnold called this ‘new journalism'.18
Critics said 'new journalism' debased cultural standards with its emphasis on
entertainment and amusement instead of instruction.

The Daily Telegraph paved the way for the expansion of the cheap daily press. A
number of other papers soon followed, including the Morning Star, the Standard and the
Daily News, which were the Telegraph's main competitors at the end of the nineteenth
century.

The London evening newspapers were also using entertainment rather than politics to
sell copies. 'All evening news is getting blood coloured', an anonymous writer in the
Spectator in 1893 said. The papers choose to 'collect from the whole world telegrams or
notices of crimes, suicides, disasters, or incidents intended to move either compassion
or a sense of horror-struck surprise.'
'The conspicuous persons are murderers and policemen, the leading events are disasters,
and the chief subjects of interest are hunts for criminals, usually, in the paragraphs,
unsuccessful.'

The reader 'never hears of anything pleasant and of the ordinary life of mankind.' The
writer concluded, 'It is difficult to remain cheerful after reading an evening paper.'19

Sunday newspapers in the Victorian Age

The early Victorian Age saw a vast increase in the number of Sunday titles and their
circulation levels. The launch of the News of The World in 1843 was swiftly followed
by the Weekly Times (January 1847), Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (November 1842) and
Reynolds's Newspaper (May 1850). By 1880 Reynolds's had reached a circulation of
300,000 and Lloyd's exceeded 600,000 in the early 1890s. It became the first newspaper
to reach one million sales in 1896.20

The Sundays used sensationalism as a means of attracting readers. The numerous

attractions of the early News of the World included reports of police court cases, foreign
news and news reports from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England . There were answers
to correspondents, chiefly on legal matters, leading articles, and the latest news about
riots in Wales, plus theatre and fashion notes, literary and arts notices, and law and
police news. In 1886 more than 50 per cent of the content of Lloyd's dealt with murder,
crime and other thrilling events. A total of 37 per cent of Reynolds's and 28 per cent of
the Weekly Times was taken up with such sensational material. Mostly 70 - 80 per cent
of the sensational material in the three papers was taken up with murder and crime.

It was the Sunday press that laid the foundations for the content of the tabloid press,
with their emphasis on murders, executions, elopements and a miscellany of small
features.21

Advertisements were numerous in Lloyd's and consequently the paper was highly
profitable. Reynolds's had trouble obtaining advertisements because of the relatively
radical political position it took (it was for a while forced to publish dubious patent
medicine advertisements that other papers would not touch). In 1886, an average edition
of Lloyd's consisted of 37 per cent advertising, against 14 per cent of Reynolds's.22

The newspapers were now more interested in making profits than agitating for Radical
reform. For the new Sundays the emphasis was on sales and business techniques. The
papers were marketed as products in a way that was new to the working-class press.
Lloyd's attracted countrywide advertising, used publicity stunts and had sale-or-return
arrangements with newsagents.

Lord Northcliffe and the birth of the Daily Mail

The next milestone in the march towards the modern tabloid newspaper came in 1896
when Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) launched the Daily Mail. Northcliffe
was not a newspaper inventor but he adapted many ideas from elsewhere, particularly
the US, and made them work.
After a career which included editing Bicycling News and contributing to Tit Bits, a
snippets magazine, Northcliffe managed to secure financial backing to launch a
magazine of his own.23.

The magazine, Answers to Correspondents, later just Answers, was full of small items
and competitions. After a shaky start the formula worked and by 1906 Answers had an
800,000 weekly circulation. The Northcliffe empire was built on this foundation, first
with magazines and comics and then with newspapers. In August 1894 he bought the
ailing London Evening news and made a success of this.

The Daily Mail was launched on 4 May 1896 and cost a halfpenny when most papers
were at least a penny. Harmsworth did not want people to think the paper cheap or to be
ashamed to be seen with it in public so he placed at the top of each front page the slogan
'A Penny Newspaper for a Halfpenny'.

Before the Mail there were 11 morning newspapers in London, Matthew Engel has
described them all as 'boring' and 'useless' The dailies were incapable of relating to their
potential readers.24 At the time of the Mail launch the Daily News had a 15,000-word
account of a routine day in Parliament, the Standard had a 2,000-word leader article
about Persia and Russia and the Daily Chronicle had 22 leading articles.

But these newspapers had their market and the serious newspapers continued to be
serious and cater for an elite readership that wanted such material. The Mail was
different. It was the beginning of a trend in the British press to the polarisation between
down-market, mass-circulation tabloids and up-market elite broadsheets with small
circulations.25

The Mail was eight pages with news, leader-page articles, magazine items, half a
column of society gossip and a serial story. It was to be the busy man's newspaper, one
that did not take long to read through. It was one that women would find interesting so
that he could hand it over to his wife when he had done with it.26 The Mail was aimed
at people with aspirations, people who earned £100 a year but hoped to earn £1,000 in
time.27

The Mail was not radical in its design and tried to look like the successful and serious
Times. But the Mail ran short items unlike its rivals. Northcliffe felt 'to report
Parliament at length or even to report it fairly at all', would bore readers. He felt it was
more important to report who said something and how it was said rather than what was
said. Significantly, Northcliffe changed the relationship of press and the public. The
Mail destroyed the old enlightened view that in an argument reason would prevail. The
argument of the leading article now gave way to the comment of the paragraph.28 The
Mail was the first English newspaper for which the word 'news' lost its old meaning of
facts which a reader ought to know if he was to vote intelligently.29

Northcliffe felt the only thing that would sell a newspaper was news, but he defined
news as 'anything out of the ordinary'.30 The Mail style was to draw the reader into the
drama of the events while a paper like the Times distanced itself from any emotional
reaction.31

The Mail expanded the newspaper buying public. It was bought by thousands of
working men who had never bought a morning paper before. But not everyone
welcomed this. Among Mail readers, one critic said, were children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of a people accustomed to public hangings, public whippings,
pillories, ducking stools and stocks.32

Despite the criticisms, the Mail did not resemble a tabloid paper of today. It was bright
and entertaining, but not brash and sensational, but it did focus on entertainment and
human interest. Using this formula it reached a circulation of 989,000 within four years
and became the first truly mass-circulation daily paper.

The Mail invested money in news coverage. This had an impact elsewhere in the
newspaper industry. As the Manchester Guardian reported, even newspapers that did
not try to compete with the Mail had to improve their news services, their make-up,
their typography, their commercial arrangements, those that could not or would not
33
improve usually perished.

The most significant aspect of the Mail was the way it encouraged economic
reorganisation of the newspaper industry. It is believed that it cost £600,000 to launch
the Mail, but mass circulation meant newspapers could be immensely profitable
businesses. It became necessary to finance the business through advertising revenues, as
income from circulation alone was too small to cover costs.34

Northcliffe believed women could be enticed to become newspaper readers, but that the
Penny newspapers had ignored their special interests. He quickly discovered that one of
the best-selling advertising spaces in the Mail was on the magazine page and this was
especially interesting to women. He then introduced a women's page which attracted
more advertisers.

Launch of the Daily Mirror

Northcliffe's belief that women readers would be attractive to advertisers led him in
November 1903 to launch a newspaper directly aimed at them. The Daily Mirror was
described as a newspaper for gentlewomen by gentlewomen. It was proclaimed a
success in an instant. Actually, it was a failure.

The newspaper trade press welcomed the new paper. Hail! Daily Mirror screamed the
headline in Master Printer and Newspaper Owner. 'The Daily Mirror will do; and it is
likely to do well. Menfolk have taken it for their womenfolk, who, so far as the writer
has been able to judge, view it most favourably.' (4 November 1903)

Press News reported the demand for the first issue 'probably created a record in the
history of modern journalistic enterprise' (28 November 1903). But sales collapsed
almost immediately The first issue broke records with a 265,217 circulation; the seventh
fell short of 100,000.35

The idea of launching a women's daily paper was not new.36 In September 1893 there
were rumours that Lady Florence Dixie was planning a halfpenny daily for women.
George Newnes, in 1896, planned to pitch the appeal of the Daily Courier to women by
using short paragraphs and non-political material in the style of his successful Tit-Bits.

The women at the Mirror were not wholly to blame for its shortcomings. Mr G A
Sutton, the Daily Mirror managing editor, who oversaw the launch, thought they could
produce a newspaper that 'while appealing particularly to women, will satisfy the
demands of the most exacting male reader'.37 He forecast success with a diet of fashion,
cookery, the requirements of the girl bachelor, sport, bridge and 'personal and exclusive
paragraphs contributed by all the leading actresses and careers for women'.

In the launch issue Northcliffe set as an aim 'to distribute our matter that the transition
from the shaping of a flounce to the forthcoming changes in Imperial defence, from the
arrangements of flowers on the dinner table to the disposition of forces in the Far East,
shall be made without mental paroxysm or dislocation of interest.' (2 November 1903)

And the early Mirror did indeed carry all of this. The very first issue included news of
major overhauls of the Army and Navy to reorganise the nation's defence, the
announcement of the retirement of Buffalo Bill and a page headed The World's Latest
News by Telegram and Cable.

But the true flavour of the Mirror was found on other pages. This was a newspaper for
the middle-class woman. The paper was dominated by Court and Social News including
the wedding arrangements for the Duke of Roxburghe and the death of the Countess of
Spencer. Readers were told Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein had spent the
weekend with Lord and Lady Cheylesmore at Hughenden Manor, Queen Alexandra had
returned to Sandringham and (no connection) Sloane Street in London 'was full of life
and movement'.

One fashion statement was probably classless, and timeless, ‘Nothing impresses mere
men more favourably than a discrete glimpse of pretty petticoats.' This was a theme that
would return to the tabloids again and again.

So what went wrong? It is too easy to say that women were unable to produce
newspapers for themselves. The early editions of the Daily Mirror suggest that
journalists tried to graft on the then successful weekly fashion and consumer journalism
onto a daily format. One supposes, even women with the most leisurely lives only need
so much news about the latest fashions from Paris. But the paper was out of touch.
More than once its leader column was written in French.38 Although the paper was
aimed at the middle-class, the Mirror, unlike the Mail in 1896, was not aspirational. It is
difficult to see how the poorer working man and woman could see themselves working
hard to acquire the lifestyle of the Mirror reader.

In January 1904 on the verge of closure the paper halved its price to one halfpenny,
altered its editorial character completely, sacked the women, changed the editor and
became the Daily Illustrated Mirror. Improvements in technology now made it possible
to print picture pages at 24,000 copies an hour.

The Mirror described itself as 'a paper for men and women' and was the first halfpenny
daily illustrated publication in the history of journalism. Northcliffe proclaimed this a
great success. But was it?

It is difficult to get at the truth since Northcliffe was prone to exaggerate the success of
his ventures. He liked to talk-up his success. In the late Victorian Age this was known
as 'booming'; today we would call it 'hype'.
He started Answers in 1888 and called its first edition issue number three to make it
look as if the questions from readers in the magazine were real. When Answers was not
a success he began a competition for readers to win £1 a week for the rest of their lives.
He claimed 700,000 people entered. The circulation at the time the competition started
was about 30,000 copies a week.

In 1896, two days after the launch of the Daily Mail, Northcliffe claimed the circulation
of the first issue was 397,215, 'a world's record first number'. This was almost certainly
a false figure since it would be impossible to collate the statistics in such a short space
of time.39

The public's reaction to the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896 and the Mirror in 1903 was
reported in suspiciously familiar fashion. Crowds besieged the Mail and Mirror offices
and extra print runs had to be made to meet demand. Northcliffe claimed both the Mail
and the Mirror's created a circulation record. The London Evening News reported a
'rush for the newspaper at railway termini'. But nobody went out of their way to point
out that the News was a Northcliffe paper too and might be unreliable on the matter.

Possibly the most blatant exaggeration was in the first issue of the Mirror itself which
ran to eight pages. 'Owing to the immense number of advertisements received by the
Mirror some thirty pages sent for this issue are held over' (2 November) Where those
advertisements were held over to remains a mystery; they certainly never ended up in
future issues of the Mirror.

Prior to the 1904 relaunch, Mirror readers had been asked what they wanted from their
newspaper. Northcliffe claimed 20,000 people responded and said they wanted a
illustrated paper (26 January 1904). Three months earlier it had proclaimed the success
of its new women's paper only to see it crash terribly. Now Northcliffe claimed the
illustrated paper as a 'new epoch in journalism'. (29 January 1904). This time he said
'Our pictures do not merely accompany the printed news. They are a valuable help to the
understanding of it.' He went on, 'What has hitherto been left to weekly papers, we shall
do every day.' (26 January 1904). In fact illustrated papers were not new. The Daily
Mail and the London Evening news had bee increasingly using illustrations to
emphasise news and the magazine page of the Daily Mail was an illustrated paper
within an ordinary paper.40

The growth of popular journalism

Northcliffe, and contemporary press barons Newnes and Pearson, believed there was a
new untapped market of readers to be exploited. Within a few months the new Mirror
had achieved a circulation of 140,000 (from a low of 25,000), by 1910 it had stabilised
at around 550,000 and was the second largest selling daily paper in the English
language, behind the Daily Mail. The Daily Graphic had also enjoyed some limited
success as a fully fledged illustrated paper.

The eventual success of the Illustrated Daily Mirror was almost certainly due to more
than its illustrations. From this relaunch the Daily Mirror was at the forefront of changes
in popular journalism. It relied on stunts rather than its journalism to get noticed. The
revamped Mirror invited readers to spot the Mirror bicycle on the streets of London,
with the winner being allowed to claim it; crowds were reported to be so large that the
authorities asked the paper to stop the contest.41
As early as 1904 the Mirror’s then editor Hamilton Fyfe had taken the paper down
market aiming the paper at readers of ‘very simple intellect.’ In Fyfe's newspaper
everything had to be explained in words of one syllable. There were also more line
block illustrations than in any other daily paper. The formula gave the Mirror the kind
of reader it had been looking for and in 1908 Edward Hulton founded the Daily Sketch
as a rival

Lord Rothermere, a financier and the brother of Northcliffe, bought the Mirror in 1914
and had command for 17 years. He turned it into an instrument for his personal
ambitions. He wanted to run the most potent financial combination in the newspaper
industry and launched the Sunday Pictorial (later named the Sunday Mirror) in 1915 to
establish financial strength.

The paper that later turned into the Sun we know today had a very different birth. It was
launched as the Daily Herald on 15 April 1912 as a challenge to capitalism.42

A committee of trade union activists launched it after it first appeared in 1911 as a strike
sheet during the London printers' strike. In its first decade it had a 'free wheeling,
independent radicalism' dominated by the editorship of George Lansbury. In contrast to
the Daily Mail that had half a million pounds to launch in 1896, the Herald had £300.
The Herald said it would contain all the usual features of a general paper but its home
and foreign news 'will not be written and coloured against the interests of labour.' and ' a
special feature will be the attention paid to trade disputes'.

After a series of financial problems the Herald became the official organ of the Trades
Union Congress and Labour Party between 1922 and 1929. In 1929, after another
financial crisis, the TUC entered partnership with the commercial printing firm
Odhams.

The 1920s and 1930s

The Mirror was unable to expand to any degree during the 1920s and early 1930s. It
directed its appeal to the dwindling middle-class and to the middle-aged.43 It even
flirted with fascism. Rothermere was an admirer of Hitler and used the Mirror and his
other newspapers, notably the Daily Mail, to offer support to the British Union of
Fascists. 44 The Mirror's stablemate publication the Sunday Pictorial had a similar line.
Both ran the same article from Rothermere in which he denied the existence of
concentration camps in Germany. 'Our own credulous Socialists ... accept the blood
curdling stories of Nazi brutality which are being circulated at the present time.' (22
January 1934).

Writing in the Pictorial, G. Ward Price said 'A Blackshirt regime in this country would
guarantee both good relations abroad and good relationships at home'. (22 June 1934).

At this time the Mirror was still a picture paper aimed at the middle-class. This was
obvious from its choice of stories and features. It ran a competition for mistresses to list
the qualities of a good maid and another for the maid to repay the compliment.
Elsewhere readers learned that 'a neat, pleasant-looking parlour maid is an asset to any
home'.45
On a typical day a front page had anything up to six photographs. The pictures were
often dull, simple, head-and-shoulders shots of people who were 'in the news'. The
layout showed little imagination. On news and feature pages headlines were small and
body copy dense. Often stories would run unbroken to 30 or more column inches.

Rothermere sold his interest in the Mirror in 1931 and with it his influence. This
allowed the Mirror to change direction and attempt to broaden its readership base. This
was important as the Mirror received less advertising per copy than any other daily
paper apart from the Sketch as advertisers of the time believed picture papers received
only limited attention from readers.46

The change began when Harry Guy Bartholomew became editorial director in 1934.47
Bartholomew started the process that was to lead to a completely tabloid popular press
in England where packaging was at least as important as content. The paper was
desperate to grab the casual buyer with headlines that frequently left room for only over-
simplifications. Such papers dramatised the trivial, the sordid and the sensational.48

During the 1930s the Mirror decided, to a large degree, to build its circulation by filling
the paper with items of maximum interest to the maximum number of people. This was
typical of controllers of popular newspapers at the time who did not believe that readers
were attracted by news. A news agency of the time neatly summed up what was
important in the news agenda. It issued a list of the most valuable stories. It ran, in this
order: sex, liquor, wealth, religion, science, and immorality. Science meant the
assertions of quacks that they had discovered a cure for cancer or could establish
communication between the earth and the moon. The same agency cabled one of its
correspondents who had made a study of economic and political conditions in the
country where he worked, 'Think-stuff Unwanted.' That might have been the motto of
the popular press in the 1920s and 1930s.49

A new style of reporting developed during the inter-war years: sensation. At its simplest
a sensational story was one that would make the reader say 'Look at This!' Hamilton
Fyfe, an editor of the period, recalls, 'In the hope of securing sensation news editors
took to sending reporters to ask questions about the feelings of duchesses whose
husbands died . . . or husbands of women killed in appalling accidents such as the
bursting of a gun.' 50

Some journalists were worried by the trend. One writer at the time recalled how an
acquaintance had been killed in an air crash. A reporter phoned her widow.
'Reporter: Is you husband flying home from Belgium today?
Wife: Yes.
Reporter: Well he's dead.
The woman collapsed and was them harried by a group of reporters who pestered her
for her husband's life story.'51

Competition for circulation

The Herald of this period was restrained financially. The TUC and Labour Party, joint
owners from 1922, gave enough money to ensure the paper’s survival but not enough to
support vigorous competition. The Herald tried to remedy this lack of editorial
resources by entering into fierce competition on circulation by offering inducements to
subscribers. The first daily to try out this way of stabilising sales was the Chronicle. In
1916 it offered readers who registered with it insurance compensation for the effects of
Zeppelin air raids. By 1924 most dailies in London were offering insurance
inducements, but the Herald could not afford to. The Mail paid out more than £1 million
by 1928 and the Express was not far behind.

After Odhams took effective control of the Herald the paper was relaunched with sales
of one million the target. New subscribers were offered an insurance scheme and a gift.
This was the first time a British paper had gone to such expense to reward new
subscribers, but the new paper put off some traditional Labour readers who stopped
buying it.

The Herald believed that a sale of one million would bring in enough advertising to
make the paper self-supporting. The News Chronicle, the Express and the Mail
retaliated against the Herald with increasingly expensive promotions. In 1932
managements agreed to limit insurance benefits and prohibit gifts. The agreement held
until March 1933 when the Herald evaded the gift rule by offering 16 volumes of
Dickens. The Chronicle, Mail and Express joined to produce a joint edition of Dickens,
offered at well below cost price. The Herald then offered encyclopaedias, which the
Express (but not the others) matched.

By now people were playing the system, remaining registered readers for as long as it
took to qualify for free gifts, before transferring their allegiances to a rival newspaper
and its free offer.

The trade journal, Newspaper World, said competition within the newspaper industry
was akin to a civil war and it undermined the editorial quality of papers. 'The reader ...
with a prospect of a free pair of trousers is not going to be hyper-critical of the editorial,
the make-up, the accuracy of the news and all that goes with the trousers. At the end of
the qualifying period he may revert to his previous paper or find another daily offering
him a coat to go with the trousers.'52

The Herald had been the initiator and the Express its most determined competitor - and
they reaped the main benefits. Both added nearly 400,000 daily copies from December
1932, so that in June 1933 the Herald became the first paper to have an audited daily
sale of two million, followed a week later by its rival. It had hoped that advertising
revenue would rise with circulation to more than cover the costs. This did not happen.
In 1933 the four main papers were spending an estimated £3.5 million a year on
circulation. The Herald had spent a pound for each of those two million readers.

The quality of Herald readers did not impress advertisers. In 1937, 95 per cent of the
Herald readers came from households with an annual income of less than £250. The
Herald reached its natural political audience, but they were not the kind of people
advertisers were interested in. This was to remain a problem for the Herald until it
closed in 1964.

The People, the Herald's stablemate publication at Odhams, also used canvassing to try
to get readers, particularly from its main rival the News of the World. Reluctant at first,
the News of the World joined in the competition. Between 1928 and 1939 it is
estimated the paper spent £940,000 on canvassing.53 Free insurance and other gift
schemes including washing machines, silk stockings and wrist watches, took resources
away from the editorial content of the newspapers.

Sir Emsley Carr, chairman of the News of the World, felt the real way to increase
circulation was to 'present a true picture of world affairs, of news both local and general,
and to present it with the highest standard of accuracy and attractiveness.' Fine words,
but it is debatable whether the News of the World met such sentiments. Editorially,
competition among the Sunday mass-circulation newspapers centred on the memoirs of
murderers and the life stories of the famous, especially film stars.

In the dailies, the Express took a lead in circulation after it improved its news coverage;
the Herald stood still, it had fewer journalists and was physically smaller than its rivals.
The result was to leave it vulnerable after the war when deprived of its artificial aids.
The war had killed the ability to offer free books through paper rationing and the Atlee
government did for insurance with its welfare state legislation. The Herald could not
compete with the Mirror that had made great strides immediately before the war
without gifts and free insurance and went on to consolidate this position eating into the
Herald’s natural territory of working-class Labour voters.

The Herald was politically distinctive. In 1936, 33 per cent of its editorial coverage was
devoted to public affairs, more than other popular rivals; the Express had 18 per cent
and the Mail 19 per cent. Six out of the seven popular papers devoted more space to
human interest material and sport as to serious public affairs. The exception was the
Herald.54

By the outbreak of the Second World War the Mirror had altered beyond recognition.
The Mirror achieved this by attracting new readers through the nature of its editorial
copy. By 1939, even with the country on the brink of war, the Mirror devoted twice as
much space to human interest stories as to politics and foreign affairs combined.

Bartholomew was a key figure in the development of the Mirror and of tabloid
journalism in the UK. He believed that most people preferred looking at papers to
reading them so no Mirror story would extend beyond 100 or so words and the
production of a mass circulation newspaper became an exercise in presentation and
display.

Bartholomew's designed the Mirror as if it were an advertising poster, using sledge-

hammer headlines of a size, blackness and stridency never seen in any British daily
newspaper before. This was to change the nature of written journalism. Stories were so
short that it became impossible to explain complex issues and debates were reduced to
slogans.

The 1949 Royal Commission on the Press saw this as a dangerous trend. It found that in
1937 headlines occupied 40 per cent of the news space on the main news page of the
Mirror. Readers got their ‘strongest and most numerous impressions of the news from
headlines'. The Commission reported that readers obtained 'at a glance an exciting but
inaccurate, because incomplete, resume of the contents of the paper, which may
themselves be an inadequate and distorted reflection of events'.55

Bartholomew had created a new type of newspaper to which the term newspaper in the
classic liberal sense hardly applies. He discovered that with the mass readership he was
after a little news went a long way and that sensational features, human stories, sports
pictures and strip cartoons had the biggest pull. Before him all daily newspapers, even
the most popular, had made at any rate a pretence of covering all the important news of
the day.

Bartholomew's contribution to journalism has its admirers and detractors. Admirers say
he spoke with the voice of the crowd and harried complacency and stimulated
controversy.56 But to others he was the despair of serious-minded journalists’.57
Whatever the merits of that argument, Bartholomew produced a popular newspaper in
the sense that the circulation rose from 720,000 when he became editorial director in
1934, to 4.5 million in 1950.

The Mirror borrowed a number of its ideas from the United States. The advertising
agency J Walter Thompson had a great influence on the direction of the paper. The
company was skilful at marketing and consumer research. It also promised to support
the Mirror with advertising.58

Mirror executives also visited The New York Daily News and borrowed some of its
best features. The Daily News was a newspaper with pictures aimed at new audiences of
working people, most of whom had previously not bought newspapers. The Mirror at
the time was a failing picture paper that was designed to be bought as a second choice
alongside a more serious paper.

Bartholomew steered the paper into a gap in the market. A shift in advertiser attitudes
towards the working class suggested that a paper catering for them would get
advertising support.59

Cecil King, later to become chairman of IPC, the Mirror's parent group, wrote at the
time: 'Our best hope was ... to appeal to young, working-class men and women. If this
was the aim it needed politics to match. In the depression of the thirties there was no
future in preaching right-wing politics to the lowest income bracket.'60 Although the
country was in the middle of one of the worst economic recessions in modern times,
with high unemployment and mass poverty, the paper was not relaunched as a radical,
campaigning paper, advocating class politics - it was relaunched as a capitalist paper to
maximise profit.

The Mirror had some trouble finding its tone of voice during this period. On the one
hand it began to develop what was to become its trademark, the social conscience. It
was against lynch law in the US and published on its front page a picture of a black
man, an alleged kidnapper, as he dangled on the end of a rope with 'thousands of
onlookers' cheering. (29 November 1933). But it could be unenlightened too. The
previous month the Mirror supported the Bishop of Birmingham's call for sterilisation
of the unfit 'to preserve and improve the quality of our race.' In an editorial the Mirror
said the state had a right and duty 'to see to it that the numbers of the unfit should not
increase, as they are increasing. Or even that there should be no unfit to burden the
community.' (23 October 1933)

One marketing device that Bartholomew used was to get his readers involved in as
much of the paper as possible. Features pages at the time asked readers to write in with
their views, or to ask for help, or for various offers. The paper studied the thousands of
letters sent in each day to find out what interested readers. Bartholomew was only
interested in a story if a campaign could be made out of it.61

This was nothing new. The News of the World had made a virtue out of its public
service features. Thousands of missing people had been reunited with relatives through
the Missing From Home feature. It sponsored numerous events; a road safety initiative
started in 1928 and ran through the 1930s. From 1942 readers were invited to send their
individual problems to the News of the World where they were assured of getting sound
advice from a team of experts. The paper also sponsored sporting and other events. It
was estimated that in 1958 it was sponsoring more than 40 separate events.62

But reader involvement in the Mirror went much further than this: by 1939 readers were
even writing many of the news stories. Each day two pages (less advertising) carried
63
stories contributed by the reader. One reason for using readers' contributions might
have been the fact that resources for editorial at the Mirror were scarce and this was a
cheap way of filling space. Even so, this contact helped to develop a relationship
between the Mirror and its readers that would become very important in the war years.

The Mirror had also started to target young readers. Love, marriage and a youthful
appearance were important to the pre-war Mirror. The paper carried a series of articles
'to induce every young couple to wed soon' which included a full page article on how to
smile.64

At this stage the Mirror was not challenging the status quo. An editorial content
analysis of the Mirror found that between 1927 and 1937 it excluded politics in favour
of material with a wider appeal to women and young readers.

The Mirror cut by half the proportion of its news devoted to political, social, economic,
and industrial issues. The shift meant that in 1939 the Mirror's coverage of domestic
public affairs was one sixth the coverage of other news. There was twice as much crime
news as politics and nearly twice as much space devoted to cartoons and other
entertainment material than foreign news (and this with Britain on the brink of war).

The Daily Mirror's stablemate Sunday Pictorial was also in transition. It had been
started in 1915 to beat the launch of the Sunday Graphic and was an instant success
selling one million copies. But in the 1920s and 1930s it had lost its way. It espoused
right-wing causes and specialised in Red-baiting. In 1934, the same year that it
supported the fascist Oswald Mosley it exposed plans by Communists 'bent on stirring
up trouble' as (bogus, the Pictorial claimed) hunger marchers converged on London. (18
February 1934).

In 1938, aged 24, Hugh Cudlipp was appointed editor. He was in time to become editor-
in-chief of the Daily Mirror group and chairman of the International Publishing
Corporation. In 1938 he set about changing the Sunday Pictorial by developing
techniques that are still used today. He published a gratuitous picture of a bare breasted
woman for the first time (more than thirty years before the Sun introduced the Page
Three Girl). He put in as many pictures of women in swimming costumes as he could
and ran photographs of 'Britain's ideal schoolgirl' in a swimming costume.
He later summed up the approach he and rivals adopted, 'A popular newspaper has to be
more than merely interesting, it must be alarmingly provocative in every issue and
abundantly confident of its own prowess and importance.'65

The Sunday market leader, the News of The World, also used sensation to build
circulation. The memoirs of murderers, life histories of sporting and entertainment
personalities, including Gracie Fields and Gary Cooper helped the circulation to rise
above 4 million by the outbreak of war.66

The Second World War

By 1946, after a war that suited the Herald's serious coverage, the paper was still
running more public affairs coverage than popular rivals. - 45 per cent to the Express
67
and Mail both at 39 per cent.

The wartime Herald had regained a political edge. It campaigned against the 'dead
wood' of the Chamberlain government and for ‘fair shares for everyone'. It was for food
rationing in 1940 and post-war reconstruction in 1945.68

But paradoxically, the war years were when the Herald began its long terminal decline.
In 1942 the Mass Observation Report noted a general shift from the broadsheet popular
papers (the Herald, Express, Mail) to the pictorials - especially the Mirror. It discovered
that the Herald had picked up 'conspicuously fewer new readers' than other papers since
1939, making almost no impact among the young. Of some concern, 13 per cent of its
readers expressed serious discontent with the paper. When asked what features of the
Herald they liked, 22 per cent of its own readers said 'nothing in particular.'

For the first time since 1915, Labour-supporting readers had a Labour-supporting
alternative, the Mirror. The Mirror had captured the tone of working people more
accurately. The Herald acted as an 'armchair statesman' criticising the government from
on high. In contrast, the Mirror was among the people, it was loyal to its readers and
showed the government it criticised no respect.69

The contributions from readers helped to shape the Mirror. It formed its views on who
its readers were by listening to them and deducing its own opinions from what it heard,
rather than, as in other newspapers, for example the Daily Express, basing its views
upon those held by authority, in the paper's offices, or in the government's.70

In 1939 the Mirror had the most cross-sectional readership of all the national dailies, but
by 1947 its readers were solidly proletarian. The way advertisers selected media helped
the Mirror's transformation during the war years. The war brought newsprint rationing
and a redistribution of advertising expenditure due to the general shortage of advertising
space. This meant that radical editorial policies and low-paid readerships no longer
carried a financial penalty and newspapers could aim solely at a working-class
readership, developing clear political identities in keeping with their more
homogeneous audiences.71

There is no clear evidence that readers bought the Mirror because of its radicalism, it is
quite likely that servicemen (who made up 30.3 per cent of readers in autumn 1941)
preferred the Mirror because of its lively 'forces' column and the charms of the Jane
cartoon.72 What they found elsewhere in its columns were criticisms of the 'brass-
buttoned bone heads' in the military who commanded them.73

Cecil King wrote, 'Bartholomew's formula was social realism though served up with
buckets of sentiment. He was catering for people whose hopes for a better life depended
on social change, without which their personal efforts could be of little avail.'74

Hugh Cudlipp later said that in 1945 the Mirror supported Labour 'because it
incorporated, or appeared to incorporate, in its programme more of the aspirations of the
Mirror's readers and writers than any other political group.' Cudlipp believed he knew
the readers because they expressed their views to their newspaper.75

The Mirror stood for social change. In 1945 it assumed that its readers above all others
deserved to benefit socially from the war, and urged them to do all that was in their
power to effect the political change that would be necessary. It believed Labour was the
only party that could cause this change.

But, unlike the Herald, the Mirror had no interest in leading the working-class to a new
Jerusalem. It was interested in social reform, but above all it wanted to be a mass
circulation newspaper and reap the profits this would bring.

Although the Mirror identified its readers as a definitive social group (Us - ordinary
working people), who were against the bosses, bureaucrats and petty officials (Them)
almost as soon as the war was over it was distancing itself from the Labour party. In the
November 1946 municipal election campaign it told readers above all to go out and
vote. It said: 'The important thing is to elect a good council. Vote and vote for the best
man. In a few cases Conservative councils have done better than Labour councils. All
honour to them. They have the interests of the people at heart. Listen to the arguments,
study local problems.'76

For the Mirror it was the political system itself that counted. Its municipal election day
coverage contrasts starkly with that of the Herald which printed the slogan: Vote Early,
Vote Labour prominently on its front page.

Post-war

From 1946 to the present there has been an increase in the amount of editorial space in
the Mirror devoted to adverts, show business, royalty, crime and other human interest
editorial material. Space devoted to domestic politics, foreign affairs and other public
affairs has fallen.

This change can be traced back to decisions taken in the immediate post-war years. In
1946 newsprint rationing meant that publishers had few ways of knowing how the
public was responding to their papers as circulations were pegged. Publishers were
cushioned by the shortage of advertising space available in the market. Costs remained
steady and cover prices had not been reduced, although the sizes of newspapers had.
This meant publishers were almost guaranteed to make a profit.77

They were also able to pursue the editorial policy of their choice without fearing
consequences on their circulation and withdrawal of advertiser support. The economic
incentive to maximise circulation was therefore greatly reduced. This changed from
September 1946 to February 1947 as newsprint restrictions were lifted and the
circulations of all titles increased.

Free sales of newspapers were resumed on a permanent basis in 1949 and statutory
newsprint controls were progressively eased after 1950 and finally abolished in 1956.
With the relaxation of restrictions came an increase in competition and therefore costs.
The pagination of the Mirror increased by 60 per cent between 1946 and 1953 and 116
per cent between 1946 and 1960.

This increase in pagination resulted in heavier costs, which in turn intensified the
pressure to increase revenue through increased circulations. Circulation also needed to
be increased in order to attract advertising revenue.

These pressures lead the Mirror to make editorial changes that would broaden its appeal
to readers across all social groups. The proletarian readers of the war years became less
important to the Mirror as it searched for ways to appeal to wider audiences. From the
1950s it tried to find common experiences other than social class that united readers,
often this was patterns of consumption (showbiz, sport, holidays, for example) and
human interest items, often presented in a sensational manner.

The Royal Commission on the Press 1949 noted that both the Mirror (with a circulation
of 3,702,332 and 23.8 per cent share of the national morning market) and the Daily
Express (with a circulation of 3,855,776 and 24.7 per cent of the national morning
market) - Britain's two largest-selling newspapers - showed that there was a large and
expanding public for sensational newspapers.78

The Royal Commission condemned the Mirror, in particular, for causing individuals
pain by intruding on their privacy. It said, 'The greater evil lies in the degradation of
public taste which results from the gratification of morbid curiosity, and in the
debasement of the professional standards of the journalist who, whether willingly or
otherwise, minister to it.'79

This argument over sensationalism and journalism standards continues today, but there
is little doubt that the sensational presentation of editorial material is a point of
competition between popular newspapers. The Mirror extolled sensationalism as a
virtue. When he became editor in 1948 Cecil Bolam wrote: 'We believe in the
sensational presentation of news and views, especially important news and views, as a
necessary and valuable public service in these days of mass readership and democratic
responsibility. We shall go on being sensational to the best of our ability.. we shall
make our mistakes, but at least we are alive.'80

In the Sunday market sensational stories were the cornerstone of the circulation fight
between the Mirror's stablemate, the Sunday Pictorial and the Herald's, the People. The
People used confession stories to gain readers. It was said anybody who had anything to
confess confessed to the People.81 The People reached a circulation high of 5 million
using exposures, one was of the vice merchants of London, which are still staple parts
of the Sunday tabloids today.

The Sunday Pictorial courted controversy in 1947 by polling its readers: Should
Princess Elizabeth marry Prince Philip? Edward Hulton, magazine proprietor, described
this as 'in gross bad taste and infinitely hurtful to the feelings of all concerned.'82
The Mirror had no real rival for working-class readers in the daily newspaper market.
The Express was aimed at a more middle-class readership and the Sketch and Herald,
for different reasons, were in terminal decline.

The Mirror's drive for a more heterogeneous readership made commercial sense.
Radical newspapers were failing during this period, not necessarily because they could
not attract readers, but because the predominantly working-class readers they had were
not sufficient, on their own, to attract a wide range of advertisers.

From the 1950s newspapers courted young readers because they attracted advertisers
and they seemed to embody important, new social trends. They were also the most
accessible part of the market because their newspaper reading habits were relatively
unfixed.

In 1953 the Mirror summed itself up: 'We are flippant about flippant matters, serious
about serious ones - but we try not to be a bore about anything... We are a cheeky,
daring, gay newspaper. But we're blowed if we are a dirty newspaper... Crime occurs - it
must be reported. When we learn of evils, it is our job to expose them. We detest
hypocrisy. We give plain meanings in plain words so that we can all understand them.'

It also defended its policy of publishing pictures of women in swim suits. 'What's
disgusting about a pretty girl if you aren't faded or jealous?' 83

The crisis at the Herald

At the time the circulation and influence of the Mirror grew the Herald went from crisis
to crisis. The start of the Herald's decline was at the end of the Second World War and
the relaxation in newsprint rationing. A long slow decline in circulation set in that
reached 1.7 million in 1955 and 1.4 million in 1960. The readers that did stay loyal were
the wrong sort to attract advertisers, containing a higher proportion of men readers
(nearly three-fifths) than any other national daily newspaper, the lowest percentage of
housewives, the highest percentage of C2+D+E readers. The single most important loss
had been among the young, leaving a higher percentage of older readers.

In the 1950s the Herald had a loyal readership, but the paper judged its news by the test
of whether or not it could help the Labour party. Some exclusives, such as the news that
Clement Atlee was to resign as party leader in the hope that Hugh Gaitskill would
84
succeed him was not allowed to run as it might be unhelpful to the leadership.

The Herald found it difficult to adapt to a changing world. It was uncomfortable with
the new era of 'permissiveness' and had no appeal to the young. It warned parents of the
dangers of rock and roll and the screen persona of James Dean.

The Herald as a popular broadsheet was particularly vulnerable to the launch of

commercial television in 1955. The Herald used serious news with pictures but this kind
of reportage could be done better and quicker by television.

By the end of the 1950s the Herald was in near terminal decline. It cut its advertising
rates as the circulation hit 1.4 million in 1960 and moved upmarket in search of
prosperous new readers. It introduced book, opera and ballet reviews and became more
critical of the generally unpopular TUC. It was still shaky in its coverage of youth and
came across as patronising.

What were the reasons for the Herald's failure? It was under staffed, under funded and
decisions were invariably dictated by immediate survival needs. It as only successful in
the 1920s when sales rose at a peak of political excitement and in the 1931 - 1933
period due to the circulation war. The relative poverty of the readers led advertisers to
exclude the paper from their schedules. The proof of the importance of the readership
profile in the highly polarised British market is that the Herald closed with a readership
double that of the Times, Financial Times and Guardian combined. In the 1960s three
radical newspapers, the News Chronicle the Sunday Citizen and the Herald itself closed,
although between them they had an average readership of 9.3 million people.85

The broadsheet populars were hit by television. The Herald and News Chronicle died,
while the Express and Mail were forced down market towards tabloidisation.

The Herald was unable to develop its own ideas. It lacked a distinctive self-confident
identity, such as enjoyed by the post-war Mirror and in the 1970s and 1980s by the
Herald's successor, the Sun.

Odhams' own research revealed that readers had strong feelings about the paper and
read it with greater intensity than people read other non-qualities. Readers were
underpaid and underprivileged and resented the way society had treated them and felt
that the Herald sympathised with them.

In 1961 the Daily Mirror Group (which later became part of the International Publishing
Corporation) bought Odhams and inherited the Herald, promising to keep it alive for
seven years. The Herald continued to fail and was eventually relaunched as the Sun.

IPC was influenced in its decision by a report on the newspaper-reading public of the
future. Mark Abrams, who believed that affluence would change the working class,
reported that within ten years half the population would be under the age of thirty five
and have different concerns to the Daily Herald generation. The consensus was that the
new readers would be better educated than the old, less class conscious and would
expect a high and rising standard of living; they would live in good houses, have cars
and expect to travel. They would vote for whoever promised competence in social
engineering - the provision of better homes, schools, cities. Consumer politics were
seen to displace ideological politics.

The launch of the Sun

The Herald was relaunched as the Sun in 1964 to attract the type of readers Abrams
predicted. It was an immediate failure and never became successful. The paper was
ahead of its time and failed to keep former readers of the Herald and found no new
ones.

After five years of struggle IPC sold the Sun to Rupert Murdoch who relaunched it in
November 1969 as a bright tabloid. Murdoch had earlier that year acquired the News of
the World from the Carr family after an acrimonious take-over fight. Murdoch revived
the paper with a diet of scandal (the sexual relationship of Christine Keeler and a
cabinet minister) and investigations (corruption at the BBC and Scotland Yard).
Murdoch was quoted as saying, 'The muck-raking tradition of popular journalism is an
honourable one.'86

Murdoch used television both to advertise his papers and as a source of news stories.
The Sun’s television advertising in 1969 gave a clear picture of where it saw its appeal.
In the relaunch week its television commercial listed the paper’s attractions as ‘A girl a
day ... win a car ... the Great Navel Review: Belly Button Week ... Love Before
Marriage ... Seven bikini briefs for a pound.’ All the classic ingredients of the new Sun
were there.

The Sun also used its aggressive television advertising style to itself make news and on
more than one occasion was reined in by the Independent Television Association (ITA)
which vetted all ads before transmission.87 The Sun used television advertising to
publicise its theme weeks - such as Dog Week, Pony Week, Ooh! La! La! Week. It is
said that the ITA refused the Sun permission for a commercial advertising Pussy Week
so the paper dropped the idea (but this story may be apocryphal).

The circulation of the Sun improved significantly immediately Murdoch relaunched it in

direct competition to the Mirror. In 1969 it is estimated that the circulation of the IPC
Sun was 650,000. Within 100 days of relaunch the circulation passed one million
copies. In 1970 the circulation rose to 1.51 million, the equivalent of a 132 per cent rise
in a single year.88 The years 1969 to 1974 represented the period of fastest circulation
growth in the history of the newspaper. In 1971 circulation reached 2.08 million; in
1972, 2.63 million and in 1973 2.93 million. In 1978 the Sun overtook the Mirror with
a circulation of more than 4 million and has been the biggest selling daily newspaper
ever since.

The Sun relaunched itself as a cheerful, happy paper at a time when the economy was in
decline and life for ordinary people was getting grimmer. The Mirror’s editorial
reflected this and was serious in tone; it was becoming middle-aged while the Sun had a
different, light, younger approach.

Larry Lamb, the editor at the time of the relaunch, made a concerted attempt to make
the Sun like the Mirror had once been. He wanted the Sun to be ‘strident, campaigning,
working-class, entertaining but politically aware, a thorn in the flesh of the
Establishment in its many guises.' Lamb believed the Mirror yearned for respectability
and as it became more responsible it grew away from its readers.89

The Sun attempted to recreate the anti-establishment feel that had been the hallmark of
the wartime Mirror. The Sun turned against what it saw as pompous do-gooders,
planners, bureaucrats, snobs and prudes who got in the way of the fun-loving family of
Sun readers. The topless Page Three Girl became the symbol of this new brashness. In
time as the Sun became more politically right-wing the family began to exclude many
groups such as blacks, liberals (often labelled the loony left), foreigners and
homosexuals.

Of course this was nothing new. The Mirror had developed a brand image as the voice
of the underprivileged. It reached its height during the Second World War when it had a
legitimate claim to represent the thoughts and ambitions of the ordinary working family.
In 1969 the Sun exploited an anti-establishment consciousness that was altogether
different. There was no clearly identifiable sizeable proletariat as there had been in
1945. The 1960s were a period of growing affluence and fragmentation of social
classes. The Sun divided people into two classes: those of us who liked to have fun and
those who were out to stop us.

The Sun’s claim to be an anti-Establishment newspaper was made from the moment of
relaunch. On day one its editorial leader said, ‘The newspaper will not be produced for
the politicians or the pundits. It will be produced for you. That is why we want you to
join this young, new, virile, campaigning newspaper.’90 Even the sports pages were not
immune. A comment column in issue one was explicit: ‘We shall hammer those in high
places and those who hide behind the Establishment.’

At the end of the first week in a summary of its position the Sun said, ‘The Sun is a
radical paper. That is to say it believes in change for the better. But not change for
change’s sake. Above all, The Sun is on the side of the people. We make no apology for
saying it again. We are not going to bow to the Establishment in any of its privileged
enclaves. Ever’.91

The Sun’s so-called attack on the Establishment could be seen within the news and
features pages. The paper was to follow the instincts of its proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
He (an Australian by birth and later an American citizen by convenience) claimed to
have egalitarian traditions. ‘We [Australians] don’t have class-ridden, out-of-date
English decadence.’92 He saw the Royal Family as the peak of a class system which was
harmful and felt that Tory politicians needed to break with people who felt they had an
inherited right to govern. He much admired Margaret Thatcher (who liked to portray
herself as a grocer’s daughter made good) as a new-style Tory.

The Sun showed no deference to the Royal Family and supported a new breed of
thrusting self-made politician. By the mid-1980s when Thatcherism was at its most
rampant this was evident throughout the pages of the Sun. Readers were encouraged to
be self-sufficient and to despise those who had not made their own way in life (or
aspired to do so).

The Sun's success saw off the ailing Daily Sketch. In March 1971 it merged with its
stablemate the Daily Mail and a new tabloid sized Mail emerged. Owners Associated
Newspapers preferred to call its new Mail a 'compact' newspaper to distance it from the
down-market connotations of the word 'tabloid'.

The Sketch had been ailing all its life. It had originally been a Rothermere publication
and was launched ad the Daily Graphic. It became the Daily Sketch and was sold to
Kemsley in 1924 when it was again titled the Graphic. It then found its way back to the
Rothermere family again in 1959 and had its name changed yet again.

At the time of the Sun's relaunch in November 1969 the Sketch was selling 871,000
copies a day which had fallen to 764,000 in 1971. The Sun put on close to 500,000 in
circulation when the Sketch closed and moved above the 2 million mark for the first
time thereby creating a two-horse race in the tabloid daily newspaper market between
the Sun and the Mirror.93

Despite a number of gimmicks such as competitions to win a racehorse and win a pub,
sales of the Sketch, which tended to reflect the past rather than the present, were never
revitalised in face of the Mirror's buoyancy in the 1960s and the Sun's relaunch. The
Sketch's owner Esmond Rothermere believed the tabloid market was going into soft
porn and did not want to go in that direction. He was reluctant to support the Sketch
financially which was in no position to compete with the well-funded Mirror, so he
allowed it to die.94

The Daily Star

When it became clear that the Sun was a success, a rival was launched by Express
Newspapers in November 1978. The Daily Star was in part a device to share overheads
and use spare capacity within the company in an attempt to make the Daily Express and
Sunday Express, two mid-market newspapers with declining circulations, profitable. At
its launch the paper was published only in Manchester and on sale in the north of
England, spreading to the rest of the country later.

The editor-in-chief Derek Jameson attempted to target the newspaper to a working-class

audience. The Star was to be 'a folksy newspaper, homely down-to-earth Manchester
paper with real values and addressed to real people'.95

It supported the Labour party because Jameson felt its potential readers would, although
the rest of the Express group supported right-wing Conservatism. The north was still the
heartland of Labour and the decision made the Star an alternative to the Thatcher-
supporting Sun.

But there was no doubt where the appeal was to be. The Star was to include 'bigger and
better boobs than the Sun'. In a memo to staff Jameson outlined the Star's philosophy
succinctly. 'No newspaper in history lost sales by projecting beautiful birds. Sex sells -
that goes for pictures and words. So the Star will have its daily quota. Bigger and better
than anyone else.'96 So the Starbird, in full colour, was born. A somewhat raunchier
version of the Sun's Page Three Girls.

Jameson later admitted that the Star had miscalculated slightly and the first issue went
'right over the top on the nipple count'.97

Even so the newspaper's proprietor, Victor Matthews, said publicly that the Daily Star
was not the kind of paper he would have in the house.

The Star intensified competition among down-market newspapers by introducing a

prize Bingo game. When it was started as a trial in the north-east of England circulation
in the region rose by 35 per cent . By May 1980 total sales were 1,162,00 a day.

The policy of making the Star a working-class Labour paper as 'sexy and frothy as the
rest' was paying dividends and it was not hurting the company's main daily paper, the
Daily Express. Eventually, Bingo was to help the Star reach a circulation of 1.9
million.98

The launch of the Star affected the circulation of both the Sun and the Mirror, but the
Sun was hardest hit. It caused the first year-on-year circulation drop in the Sun since
Murdoch took over. The Sun circulation fell from 4 million in 1978 to 3.6 million in
1981 when the Star went national.99
Murdoch reorganised the Sun to see off the threat from the Star. In 1981 he appointed a
new editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, increased television advertising, cut the Sun's cover
price and introduced its own Bingo game, with bigger prizes. The Sun's circulation
increased by 500,000 in three months.

The Star was seriously lacking in resources and could not compete with rivals on equal
terms. It accumulated losses of £58 million up to the end of 1986 and was 'one of the
biggest disasters Fleet Street has ever known.' But the Express went into profit because
the Star shared overheads.100

MacKenzie was to become one of the most dominant journalists of the 1980s. He was
Thatcherism personified and used the editorial pages of the newspaper to support the
Conservative government with a zeal. Of course, he was not alone in this, Murdoch,
who was expanding his own media empire was a keen supporter of the free market
economics that the government espoused because it suited his business ambitions.
MacKenzie’s influence went beyond simply producing politically-biased newspapers,
he introduced a tone of nastiness to the paper that was sometimes breathtaking.101

The Sun’s move to Wapping

A chief function of Murdoch’s British newspapers, which today comprise the Sun, the
News of The World, Times and the Sunday Times, was to raise cash to finance a world-
wide media conglomerate. Since the early 1980s they had been a crucial source of cash
to meet the interest payments on the debt he had taken out to expand his main company,
News Corporation, particularly in the United States.102

By 1982 some of his once profitable British newspapers were losing money. In an
attempt to increase profitability a new printing plant was built at Wapping in east
London. Murdoch planned a swift move to the new plant, making his expensive print
workers redundant and refusing to recognise trade unions.103 This plan had been made
easier to achieve because the Conservative government, supported by Murdoch
newspapers, had changed employment laws which, in effect, left trade unions powerless
to resist managements.104 Under great secrecy the printing plant was equipped with
computer technology and a new staff was trained to operate it. In January 1986, without
an agreement with trades unions at the company, the Wapping plant was opened.

In contravention of employment laws, which restricted the number of pickets at any one
site to six people, thousands of people demonstrated at Wapping. To keep out protesters
the plant was ringed with razor wire, fenced with steel and scanned by closed-circuit
television. More than 1,000 police officers per day were employed to keep the
demonstrators away. This continued for nearly a year.

The move to Wapping had a dramatic effect on News International’s balance sheet.105
The wage bill was immediately cut by £45 million a year. In 1985, before the move,
News International made £39.1 million profit on sales of £423 million in Britain. But
two years later in 1987 the pre-tax profit was £98.3 million on sales of £502 million. In
1988 the pre-tax profit was £165 million on sales of £586 million. The profits were used
to finance News Corporation’s other media interests.

In the move to Wapping Murdoch had failed to realise that his printing machinery was
outdated. It was unable to produce colour newspapers (these were not the norm among
national dailies at the time) and this gave the Mirror, which could, an edge in the
market. Any colour newspaper sitting on the newsagents’ shelf alongside one produced
exclusively in black and white will always look more attractive. The Mirror was able to
market itself as a more modern newspaper and was able to pick up some circulation.106
The dispute also affected production at Wapping and copies of the Sun were lost.

One of the legacies of Wapping was the change it induced in the editorial content of the
Sun. The Sun had always been brash but from this point it became positively triumphal.
The Sun, it felt, had stood alone and beaten off the enemy to secure its new plant. This
change of editorial tone first became evident during the months of the demonstration
when, for no obvious reason, it began to print slogans throughout the paper saying: You
Can’t Beat Wapping. It continuously used the word Wapping in headlines as a pun on
‘whopping’. It was not modest in victory.

More crucially, the Sun felt it was unbeatable and this led the paper to make a series of
serious misjudgments in the selection and presentation of news. A ‘bunker mentality’
had set in among the staff. The Sun had always had a definite view of who was ‘one of
us’ and who was not, but with the victory at Wapping behind it the Sun began to attack
whole groups and individuals, almost at random. This was to lead, in time, to a £1
million out-of-court settlement with rock star Elton John, after a series of stories about
his private life were published, and a long standing dispute with the people of Liverpool
after coverage of a disaster at Hillsborough football stadium.107 The paper was also to
attack sections of society, who (presumably) it saw as outside of the Sun family. In
particular the columnist Garry Bushell ran a series of articles attacking homosexuals.108

Robert Maxwell and the Mirror

At about the same time the Sun was preparing for, and making, its move to Wapping the
Mirror had to contend with a new publisher, Robert Maxwell. Not since the age of
Rothermere had a proprietor of the Mirror had such an influence on its editorial content.
He took over the Mirror Group of newspapers in July 1984 and during the seven years
that he owned the paper hardly an editorial comment went into the paper without it first
being approved by Maxwell personally.109 One of Maxwell’s first acts was to order the
closure of all the Mirror’s foreign bureau and stop retainer payments to all freelance
reporters who operated for the paper overseas. This had the obvious detrimental effect
on the Mirror’s foreign coverage.

Maxwell’s ego knew no bounds. He was featured in the paper making printing deals, he
wrote editorials, he altered journalists’ copy. He even thought he could solve all the
world’s ills, from Aids to starvation in Africa. During the 1984-85 miners’ strike he
seriously believed that he could act as intermediary between the government and the
National Union of Mineworkers.110

When he took over the Mirror Maxwell announced that he would increase the number
of Mirror readers by one million within a year. To do this the Mirror introduced a bingo
game with a top prize of £1 million and Maxwell himself promoted it on television. But
every attempt Maxwell made to best the Sun was thwarted. Within five days the Sun
had beaten the Mirror and announced its own £1 million bingo winner. To regain the
initiative Maxwell then cut the cover price of the Mirror by a penny. Every day for the
next three weeks the front page of the paper was dominated by news of the million
pound bingo game and the price cut.

At the end of his first year in control, despite £5 million being spent on promotion,
circulation of the Mirror had fallen by 350,000 copies. To counter this the Mirror
launched a £10 million promotion campaign.

In an attempt to cut printing costs of the Mirror, which were approximately three times
those of the Sun, Maxwell took on his own print unions and suspended publication of
all his titles for 11 days and threatened to close them for good unless the unions agreed
to a redundancy package. The unions accepted and costs at the papers were reduced by
£40 million a year.111

In November 1991 Maxwell died in suspicious circumstances and almost immediately it

became clear that his publishing empire had been built on crooked deals and money
stolen from pension funds. Mirror Group Newspapers was close to bankruptcy and the
banks were called in. A new chief executive called David Montgomery was appointed
to undertake a series of cost saving measures. Over the next three years more than 200
journalists lost their jobs, trade unions at the group were derecognised and many good,
experienced people left.112 In total the work force fell from 3,125 to 2,785, but by 1994
profits had risen to £189 million.113 The content of the newspaper was affected by
these changes and circulations continued to fall.

The Sun’s market dominance grew. By 1995, after a prolonged period of cover-price
cutting, it had a circulation of four million against the Mirror’s 2.6 million. By then it
had been setting the news agenda of popular newspapers for 25 years and it had become
the litmus paper by which the rest of the media has come to judge the changes in British
working-class culture.114

Post-Wapping and Sport Newspapers

The changes in production practice brought about by Wapping dramatically cut the cost
of newspaper production and increased the possibility for profit. Four new national
dailies were launched into crowded markets (the Independent, Today, the Daily Post
and Daily Sport) and four Sundays (Sunday Corespondent, News on Sunday,
Independent on Sunday and Sunday Sport.) Four have closed (Today, Post, News on
Sunday and Correspondent) and two others continue to struggle on (the Independent and
Independent on Sunday). Only two have made a profit (the Daily and Sunday Sports),
both are tabloids, and both found an unexploited gap in the market.

The Sunday Sport was launched by David Sullivan as a logical and safe alternative to
the adult magazines that had made his fortune.115 It was also a convenient way for him
to advertise his sex products for nothing. Since its launch in September 1986, the paper
has been noted for the number of pages containing advertisements for Sullivan's own
mail order business.

Sullivan saw a gap in the newspaper market and estimated that 9 million adults did not
read a Sunday newspaper. He devised a sports paper with sex that would make you
laugh. The early newspapers were notable for the outlandishly untrue stories they
carried, alongside the many pictures of women showing their naked breasts.116
Sullivan reckoned that if costs were kept to an absolute minimum the paper could
break-even on a circulation of about 250,000 copies. To control costs, the Sunday Sport
was first launched in London and the south-east and then rolled out across the country.
The first edition sold 280,000 copies and the circulation quickly settled down at
230,000 putting it immediately into profit. No other launch post-Wapping was such a
commercial success.

The success of the Sunday Sport also worried at least one established newspaper group.
In 1987 the Star was losing £1m a month with a circulation of 1.25m. United
Newspapers (its owners), fearful that the Sunday Sport would launch a daily version as
a direct rival, acquired a minority stake in Apollo Ltd, the Sunday Sport parent
company.117

Michael Gabbert was moved from the Sunday Sport to edit the Star. He took the paper
further down-market. Nothing quite like it had been seen before in mainstream daily
newspapers. He published on the front page a photograph of a 15-year-old schoolgirl
with the paragraph. 'She's 15, she's got a forty-inch bust, she's going topless in 34 days.
If you were her mum, would you let her?' Readers were then invited to vote. Later the
paper published a two-page spread of photographs of schoolgirls in gymslips.

Elsewhere in the paper they introduced sexually-explicit fake letters to the agony aunt
column. One news story reported how a young woman had been assaulted by a boy and
supposedly enjoyed part of the assault. It was not true.

Questions about the decline of standards in the Star were asked in the House of
Commons, but it was the withdrawal of their £400,000 advertising contact by Tesco and
threats to do likewise from three other major advertisers that put a halt to the enterprise.
The editor was sacked and the agreement with Apollo was ended after only eight weeks.

Following the collapse of the joint venture with the Star, Sullivan launched his own
daily newspaper, the Daily Sport, in August 1988. This was to be a daily version of the
Sunday Sport financed on its profits.118 It was immediately controversial. A Press
Council ruling said that it should not be regarded as a newspaper, rather it was a daily
magazine for the entertainment of its readers and should therefore be placed on the top
shelves in newsagents away from the reach of children. Even today the Sport is not
recognised as a mainstream newspaper.

1
Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder A Day, A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold, 1998,
pp18 - 19.
2
S Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds, A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids, University of
Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1992, pp8 - 13.
3
The first daily newspaper, the Courant, had been published in 1702
4
Jeremy Black, The English Press in the 18th Century, Croom Helm, London, 1987, p14.
5
Jeremy Black, The English Press in the 18th Century, Croom Helm, London, 1987 pp 251 - 252
6
G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society, from Caxton to Northcliffe, Longman, London, 1978. pp 86 -
87
7
Jeremy Black, The English Press in the 18th Century, Croom Helm, London, 1987, pp 28 - 29.
8
G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society, from Caxton to Northcliffe, Longman, London, 1978, pp 112 -
118.
9
G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society, from Caxton to Northcliffe, Longman, London, 1978, p90.
10
James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
3rd ed, Routledge, London, 1988, p16.
11
Raymond Williams, 'Radical and / or Respectable', in Richard Boston (ed), The Press We Deserve,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1970, p21.
12
Raymond Williams, 'The Press and Popular Culture: an historical Perspective', in George Boyce, James
Curran, Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day, Constable,
London, 1978, p46.
13
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, London, 1963, pp720 - 729.
14
James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
3rd ed, Routledge, London, 1988, pp15 - 23.
15
Raymond Williams, 'The Press and Popular Culture: an historical Perspective', in George Boyce, James
Curran, Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day, Constable,
London, 1978, p47.
16
Anthony Smith, The Newspaper, an International History, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979, p147.
17
Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder A Day, A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold,
1998, pp50 - 53
18
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Pelican, London, 1961, 217 - 218.
19
The Spectator, London, 2 December 1893, pp795-796.
20
Virginia Berridge, 'Popular Sunday Papers and Mid-Victorian Society', in George Boyce, James Curran,
Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day, Constable, London,
1978, pp249 - 257.
21
Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder A Day, A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold,
1998, p51.
22
Virginia Berridge, 'Popular Sunday Papers and Mid-Victorian Society', in George Boyce, James Curran,
Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day, Constable, London,
1978, p230.
23
Matthew Engel, Tickle The Public, 100 Years of the Popular Press, Victor Gollancz, London, 1996,
pp53 - 54.
24
Matthew Engel, Tickle The Public, 100 Years of the Popular Press, Victor Gollancz, London, 1996,
p57.
25
Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder A Day, A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold,
1998, p56.
26
Hamilton Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street, W. H. Allen, London, 1949. p80.
27
Matthew Engel, Tickle The Public, 100 Years of the Popular Press, Victor Gollancz, London, 1996,
p59 - 61.
28
Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell, London, 1959, pp199 - 213.
29
Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus, The Daily Herald and The Left, Pluto Press, London, 1997, p11.
30
Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell, London, 1959, p214.
31
Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus, The Daily Herald and The Left, Pluto Press, London, 1997, p11.
32
Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell, London, 1959, p213.
33
Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell, London, 1959, p214.
34
Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder A Day, A History of Mass Communications in Britain, Arnold,
1998, p57.
35
As reported by Cudlipp Hugh, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror,
Andrew Dakers, London, 1953, p13.
36
Jeffrey Wright, 'If You Really Want To Know - Look in The Victorian Mirror', in Journalism Studies
Review, Cardiff, July 1982, p24.
37
MPNO 28 October 1903 p16.
38
See 12 November 1903, for example.
39
Matthew Engel, Tickle The Public, 100 Years of the Popular Press, Victor Gollancz, London, 1996,
p62.
40
Jeffrey Wright, 'If You Really Want To Know - Look in The Victorian Mirror', in Journalism Studies
Review, Cardiff, July 1982, p25.
41
Matthew Engel, Tickle The Public, 100 Years of the Popular Press, Victor Gollancz, London, 1996,
p151.
42
Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus, The Daily Herald and The Left, Pluto Press, London, 1997, pp1 -
13.
43
Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, Andrew Dakers,
London, 1953, p63.
44
The Mirror published an article written by Rothermere under the headline Give The Blackshirts a
Helping Hand on January 22, 1934. It was also published in the Sunday Pictorial on the previous day.
45
Daily Mirror May 19, 1932.
46
James Curran, Angus Douglas and Garry Whannel, 'The Political Economy of the Human Interest
Story', in Smith Anthony ed, Democracy and newspapers, International Essays on a Changing Medium,
MIT Press, 1980, p292.
47
Bartholomew was a controversial figure, for a discussion on his qualities see Francis Williams,
Dangerous Estate, The Anatomy of Newspapers, Longmans, , London, 1957, p226 - 227 and Hugh
Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, Andrew Dakers, London,
1953, pp48-62. For a less flattering view see Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, Fleet Street
Ownership in the 20th Century, Faber and Faber, London, 1986, p159.
48
Tom Baistow, Fourth-Rate Estate, An Anatomy of Fleet Street, Comedia, London, 1985, p42.
49
Hamilton Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street, W. H. Allen, London, 1949, p206.
50
Hamilton Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street, W. H. Allen, London, 1949, p182
51
Newspaper World, 13 January 1934, p1.
52
Newspaper World, 12 August 1933, p1.
53
Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of The World Story, Harper Collins, London, 1993,
p100 - 101
54
Charles Wintour, The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street, Hutchinson, London, 1989, p58.
55
Royal Commission on the Press, Final Report, Cmnd 7700, HMSO, London, 1949, Par 494.
56
Francis Williams, Dangerous Estate, The Anatomy of Newspapers, Longmans, London, 1957, p227.
57
Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory, Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century, Faber and Faber,
London, 1986, p41.
58
Hugh Cudlipp, Walking on the Water, Bodley Head, London, 1974, p54.
59
James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
London, Routledge, 3rd ed, London, 1988, p62.
60
Cecil King, Strictly Personal, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969, 101.
61
Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, Andrew Dakers,
London, 1953, p83.
62
Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of The World Story, Harper Collins, London, 1993, pp
130 - 132.
63
On 6 March 1939, for example, the Mirror reported a golden wedding anniversary from Coalville,
Leicestershire.
64
Daily Mirror, 4 March and 15 March 1939.
65
Hugh Cudlipp, At Your Peril, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1962, p47. Hugh Cudlipp, 'Exclusive:
the first nude in Fleet Street', in British Journalism Review, Vol 5, No 3, 1994, pp17 - 19.
66
Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of The World Story, Harper Collins, London, 1993,
p103.
67
James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
3rd ed, Routledge, London, 1988, p126.
68
Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus, The Daily Herald and The Left, Pluto Press, London, 1997, p159 -
161
69
A. C. H. Smith with Elizabeth Immirzi and Trevor Blackwell, Paper Voices, The Popular Press and
Social Change, 1935 - 1965, Chatto and Windus, 1975, p72.
70
The best account of this is A. C. H.. Smith, with Elizabeth Immirzi and Trevor Blackwell, Paper
Voices, The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935-1965, London, Chatto and Windus, 1975, p85.
71
James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, The Press and Broadcasting in Britain,
3rd ed, Routledge, London, 1988. p75.
72
Jane was a scantily dressed ‘modern girl’. For a description of her role and that of other cartoons in the
Mirror from this era see Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily
Mirror, Andrew Dakers, London, 1953, pp68-77.
73
Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol 2; the 20th Century, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 1984, p605.
74
As quoted in A. C. H. Smith with Elizabeth Immirzi and Trevor Blackwell, Paper Voices, The Popular
Press and Social Change, 1935 - 1965, Chatto and Windus, 1975, pp140-141.
75
A. C. H. Smith with Elizabeth Immirzi and Trevor Blackwell, Paper Voices, The Popular Press and
Social Change, 1935 - 1965, Chatto and Windus, 1975, p114 .
76
1 November, 1946.
77
James Curran, Angus Douglas and Garry Whannel, 'The Political Economy of the Human Interest
Story', in Smith Anthony ed, Democracy and newspapers, International Essays on a Changing Medium,
MIT Press, 1980, p297. Royal Commission on the Press, 1949, op cit, p82.
78
Royal Commission on the Press, 1949, par 565.
79
Royal Commission on the Press, 1949, par 490.
80
As quoted in Robert Connor, Cassandra, Reflections in a Mirror, Cassell, London, 1969,p78. The irony
is that the following year Bolam was imprisoned for three months and the Mirror was fined £10,000 for a
contempt of court after the sensational coverage of the Haigh murder trial. See Walter Greenwood and
Tom Welsh, McNae's Essential Law For Journalists, Butterworth, 12th ed, London, 1992, p108.
81
Hugh Cudlipp, At Your Peril, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1962, p292.
82
Hugh Cudlipp, At Your Peril, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1962, p150.
83
This was in a full page editorial of 13 November 1953, in response to Press Council criticisms that
popular newspapers were too sensational in their coverage and concentrated too much on sex and crime.
84
Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus, The Daily Herald and The Left, Pluto Press, London, 1997, pp165 -
181.
85
James Curran, ‘Advertising and the Press’, in James Curran ed, The British Press, a Manifesto,
London, Macmillan Press, London, 1978, pp229 - 270.
86
Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of The World Story, Harper Collins, London, 1993,
p237.
87
As quoted in Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, The Rise and Fall of the
Sun, Heinemann, London, 1990,p32.
88
These statistics are from the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
89
In fact the Mirror was anything but respectable at this point. It had a crisis within its own management
at controlling company IPC when, on May 10,1968 the IPC chairman Cecil King published in the Mirror
an editorial he had written headlined Enough Is Enough, calling for the Wilson Labour government to
resign. Although he had announced to senior executives in advance that he was going to publish the
editorial, they disapproved and he was removed from his post soon after publication and replaced by
Cudlipp. It later became known that King had become convinced that only a military coup would save
Britain and that he had asked Lord Mountbatten if he would head a government of national unity.
Mountbatten refused. see S J Taylor, Shock! Horror! The Tabloids in Action, Bantam Press, London,
1991, pp11-12, Cecil King, The Cecil King Diaries 1965-1970, Jonathan Cape, London, 1972 pp192-
200.
90
17 November , 1969.
91
21 November , 1969.
92
Roslyn Grose, The Sun-sation, The Inside Story of Britain's Bestselling Daily Newspaper, Angus and
Robertson, London, 1989, p39.
93
Larry Lamb, Sunrise, The Remarkable Rise and Rise of the Best-selling Soaraway Sun, Papermac,
1989, pp188 - 189.
94
S. J. Taylor, The Reluctant Press Lord, Esmond Rothermere and the Daily Mail, Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London, 1998, p175.
95
Derek Jameson, Last of the Hot Metal Men, From Fleet Street to Showbiz, Ebury Press, London, 1990,
pp70 - 76.
96
Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, The Rise and Fall of the Sun, Heinemann,
London, 1990, p70.
97
Derek Jameson, Last of the Hot Metal Men, From Fleet Street to Showbiz, Ebury Press, London, 1990,
pp75 - 78.
98
Charles Wintour, The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street, Hutchinson, London, 1989, p161.
99
Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, The Rise and Fall of the Sun, Heinemann,
London, 1990, pp69 - 71.
100
Charles Wintour, The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street, Hutchinson, London, 1989, p162.
101
There is a body of work devoted to the Sun’s coverage of minorities, see for example Chris Searle,
Your Daily Dose: Racism and the Sun, CPBF, London, 1989 and Gary Armitage et al, Out of the Gutter,
a survey of the treatment of homosexuality by the press, CPBF, London, 1987.
102
The most detailed account of Murdoch’s financial background is Richard Belfield, Christopher Hird,
and Sharon Kelly, Murdoch The Great Escape, Warner Books, London, 1994.
103
There is a body of work detailing the role of printing unions in national newspapers and in particular
the high wages and various working conditions they had been able to negotiate. Most suggest that
managements were weak in the face of union demands. For example see Linda Melvern, The End of The
Street, Methuen, London, 1986. and David Goodhart and Patrick Wintour, Eddie Shah and the
Newspaper Revolution, Coronet, London, 1986, pp49-113. On problems at the Mirror in particular see
Tom Bower, Maxwell The Outsider Mandarin, London, 1991, pp359-360.
104
For a detailed discussion of this and an examination of the move to Wapping see Suellen M. Littleton,
The Wapping Dispute, Avebury, Aldershot, 1992.
105
News International is wholly owned by News Corporation and controls Murdoch’s British
newspapers. The financial figures are taken from Belfield et al , op cit, p103.
106
The Mirror had colour for 18 months before the Sun. It is estimated that it added 100,000 to the
circulation, See Nicholas Davies, The Unknown Maxwell, Pan, London, 1993.
107
The Elton John stories were published in 1987 and the Hillsborough story in April 1989
108
This was considered such a good idea by the Sun that a special T-shirt with an anti-homosexual
slogan was offered to readers.
109
This is the observation of Nicholas Davies who was foreign editor of the Mirror during most of the
Maxwell years. See Davies op cit, p121.
110
There are a number of accounts of Maxwell’s behaviour. For example see Mark Hollingsworth, The
Press and Political Dissent, Pluto, London, 1986, p244. On the miners strike see John Pilger, Heroes, Pan,
London, 1987, p519-520.
111
Tom Bower, Maxwell The Outsider Mandarin, London, 1991, p 400.
112
Despite this the Mirror continued its support of the Labour Party and by 1995 was publishing
membership applications forms for the party in its editorial columns free of charge.
113
These statistics are taken from It’s As Bad As The Tory Press, in Tall Storeys, National Union of
Journalists Mirror Group News, Summer 1995, p1.
114
Roy Greenslade, 'From Sun God to Sky Diver', in Guardian, 23 January 23, 1994, p21.
115
Mark Killick, Sultan of Sleaze, The Story of David Sullivan's Sex and Media Empire, Penguin,
London, 1994, pp 71 - 89.
116
One such was the story about a World War Two bomber found on the Moon.
117
Mark Killick, Sultan of Sleaze, The Story of David Sullivan's Sex and Media Empire, Penguin,
London, 1994, pp 90 - 100.
118
Mark Killick, Sultan of Sleaze, The Story of David Sullivan's Sex and Media Empire, Penguin,
London, 1994, pp 102 - 105.

At the time of writing Dr Richard Rooney was Principal Lecturer and Head of the
Department of Journalism at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK.