Everything about Alfred Harmsworth 1st Viscount Northcliffe totally explained
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (
15 July1865 -
14 August1922) rose from childhood poverty to become a powerful
newspaper and publishing magnate, famed for buying stolid, unprofitable newspapers and transforming (some say demeaning) them to make them lively and entertaining for the mass market. During his lifetime, he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion. Unfortunately,
megalomania contributed to a nervous breakdown shortly before his death.
Although born near
Dublin, Harmsworth was educated at the
Stamford School in
Lincolnshire,
England. He was the elder brother of
Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere and the Liberal politician
Cecil Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth.
Beginning as a free-lance journalist, he founded his first newspaper,
Answers (original title:
Answers to Correspondents), and was later assisted by his brother
Harold, who was adept at business matters. Harmsworth had an intuitive sense for what the reading public wanted to buy, and began a series of cheap but successful periodicals, such as
Comic Cuts (tagline: "Amusing without being Vulgar") and the journal
Forget-Me-Not for women. From these periodicals, he built what was then the largest periodical publishing empire in the world,
Amalgamated Press.
Harmsworth was an early pioneer of
tabloid journalism. He bought several failing newspapers and made them into an enormously profitable chain, primarily by appealing to the popular taste. He began with
The Evening News in 1894, and then merged two
Edinburgh papers to form the
Edinburgh Daily Record. On 4 May 1896, he began publishing the
Daily Mail in
London, which was a hit, holding the world record for daily circulation until Harmsworth's death; taglines of
The Daily Mail included "the busy man's daily journal" and "the penny newspaper for one halfpenny". Harmsworth then transformed a Sunday newspaper, the
Weekly Dispatch, into the
Sunday Dispatch, then the highest circulation Sunday newspaper in Britain. Harmsworth also founded the
The Daily Mirror in 1903, and rescued the financially desperate
Observer and
Times in 1905 and 1908, respectively. In 1908, he also acquired
The Sunday Times.
In 1905 Harmsworth was given the title of
Baron Northcliffe, of the Isle of Thanet and in 1918 advanced to
Viscount Northcliffe, of St Peters in the County of Kent, for his service as the head of the British war mission in the
United States.
Lord Northcliffe was also involved in politics. For example, his newspapers — especially
The Times — reported the
Shell Crisis of 1915 with such zeal that it brought down the
wartime government of
Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, forcing him to form a coalition government. Lord Northcliffe's newspapers led the fight for creating a
Minister of Munitions (first held by
David Lloyd George) and helped to bring about Lloyd George's appointment as Prime Minister in 1916. Lloyd George offered Lord Northcliffe a post in his cabinet, but Northcliffe declined and was appointed Director for Propaganda. Such was Northcliffe's influence on propaganda over the Germans in WWI, German battleships were sent to shell his house in an attempt to assassinate him. His former residence still bears a shell hole in respect of his gardener's wife who was killed in the attack.
In 1903, Harmsworth founded the
Harmsworth Cup, the first international award for
motorboat racing. Similar to the
Olympic Games, each entry in the race is supposed to represent a
nation.
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