Cudlipp and King: Tyrants of Fleet Street - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2003 by George Evans

Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street. Ruth Dudley Edwards. Secker & Warburg. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 484 pages. ISBN 0-436-19992-0.

'Power', Cecil King said after he was sacked as chairman of the International Publishing Company, 'is what I miss most. The feeling that millions listen to me; that I can give orders to thousands'. It hurt all right but what probably hurt more was his belief that he had been the victim of a conspiracy master-minded by his trusted deputy, Hugh Cudlipp. The IPC, one of the world's largest publishers in the post-war years, was driven by King's business acumen and the editorial genius of Cudlipp. Its flagship, The Daily Mirror, achieved a world record circulation of more than five million in the mid-1960s which was more than twice as many papers as it sells now. King and Cudlipp, a formidable alliance in what this entertaining, closely-observed book calls the glory years of Fleet Street, were watched closely by their competitors in the cut throat scramble for circulation. They had little in common in temperament, taste or background. His ideal newspaper, King once famously remarked, would have a circulation of one.

Cecil Harmsworth King, nephew of Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, and of Lord Rothermere, was born into a powerful press dynasty and a life of wealth and privilege. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, he was an intellectual but with a talent for business rather than journalism. A tail, commanding presence, he was patrician, aloof and condescending. His aloofness, he said was an aid to good judgement of men and situations though it seemed to have let him down when it came to the manner of his abrupt departure from a company he had served for more than forty years, seventeen of them as chairman.

Cudlipp, the youngest of three Welsh brothers, all of whom became editors of national Fleet Street papers, left school at fourteen. He spent five years as a junior reporter on local papers before he got to Fleet Street where he made his name as features editor of the Daily Mirror. He was appointed editor of the Sunday Pictorial at the age of 24 by Cecil King. Tough and ruthless in getting his own way, he was a journalist of outstanding ability and flair, a born extrovert. Despite his Welsh Wesleyan-Methodist background, he had a taste for socialising and an impressive capacity for alcohol in the days, Ruth Dudley Edwards says, when the papers were produced on an ocean of alcohol. Well, some of them were, but let that pass.

King, no ascetic himself, travelled widely and in style, en prince as he called it. In Washington where he said he was treated like royalty he was flattered when President Kennedy asked him what he thought was wrong with the United States. A good question but a difficult one to answer off the cuff, he later reflected. Back home, however, he had no difficulty in spelling out what he thought was wrong with Britain. Megalomania, there is no other word for it, and an obsession with politics drove him to conclude that Harold Wilson and the Socialist government had lost credibility and authority. He decided they would have to go to make way for an emergency coalition government of businessmen and others under the titular leadership of Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten who accused him of folie de grandeur dismissed the idea of taking over the country as rank treason and told King to get out when he put it to him.

Two days after Mountbatten and King met The Daily Mirror came out with a signed article by King which filled most of the front page. Headlined 'Enough is Enough', it called on the Parliamentary Labour Party to get rid of Wilson. The country, he wrote was threatened with the greatest financial crisis in its history. Since he was a director of the Bank of England it was a declaration which caused outrage and a high state of alarm in the money markets. It was more than enough for the directors of the IPC who had become increasingly concerned over his preoccupation with politics and diminishing interest in running the company. A board meeting unanimously decided that he should be asked to retire forthwith. He refused to go and was dismissed without further ado by Cudlipp who succeeded him. It was, he said bitterly as he departed, a conspiracy of a particularly squalid kind which had brought about his downfall, a sorry end to a long career in Fleet Street which in truth it was.

George Evans was Managing Editor of The Sunday Telegraph for ten years.