Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda

Lord Northcliffe and the Great War, 1914-1919

J. Lee Thompson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612772141
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda represents the most recent and most extensive research on Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), one of the "press lords" who influenced British politics and policy during the First World War. Thompson's is the only study to deal with Northcliffe and the inseparable quality of his public and political career from his journalism.

Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda addresses a wide range of topics—the Great War, journalism, propaganda, censorship, the use and misuse of power, his preoccupation with America, and Northcliffe's influence on David Lloyd George—and will appeal to those interested in the history of modern journalism as well as twentieth-century British history.

Notes

ONE

Introduction: Background and Prelude to War

1. Nicoll to Northcliffe, 28 June 1919, Northcliffe Add. Mss., 62347, f.126, British Library (hereafter BL).

2. The most attention paid to Northcliffe in the war has come in the many biographies published since William Carson’s Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (New York: Dodge Publishing Co., 1918). Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth’s Northcliffe (London: Cassell, 1959) and Henry Hamilton Fyfe’s Northcliffe: An Intimate Biography (London: Macmillan, 1930) contain the most wartime material.

3. John M. McEwen, “The National Press During the First World War: Ownership and Circulation,” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 466–67, 470–71, 474.

4. For an analysis of the different segments of the British press up to 1914, see James D. Startt, Journalists for Empire: The Imperial Debate in the Edwardian Stately Press, 1903–1913 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 6–7.

5. McEwen, “The National Press During the First World War,” 482.

6. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 18–19; Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 273.

7. Taxes on advertisements and newspapers were repealed in 1853 and 1855. The duty on paper was removed in 1861. Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 2.

8. For a view of the debates over the New Journalism, including just how “new” it was, see Joel Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions. The New Journalism in Britain 1850–1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985).

9. Mathew Arnold, “Up to Easter,” The Nineteenth Century 21 (May 1887): 638–39.

10. Asa Briggs, The Birth of Broadcasting (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 42.

11. Koss, Political Press, I: 1, 3, 9; Brown, Victorian News, 274; David Ayerst, Garvin of the Observer (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 1.

12. Tom Clarke, My Northcliffe Diary (New York: Cosmopolitan Publishing Co., 1931), 4.

13. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 12–14.

14. Ibid., 17. Geraldine Harmsworth bore fourteen children, eleven of which survived.

15. Ibid., 26.

16. Tom Clarke, Northcliffe in History (London: Hutchinson, 1952), 24; Piers Brendon, The Life and Death of the Press Barons (New York: Athenum, 1983), 111.

17. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 40.

18. Ibid., 35.

19. Northcliffe’s nephew, Cecil Harmsworth King, reported in his memoir, Strictly Personal (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 60, that Alfred had been banished from the family premises because “he got the family servant in the family way.”

20. Tom Clarke, who worked for Northcliffe at the Daily Mail, doubted if Northcliffe “could have tolerated Oxford for six months.” My Northcliff Diary, 2.

21. Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 29.

22. J. A. Hammerton, With Northcliffe in Fleet Street, (London: Hutchinson, 1932), 29.

23. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 92–94.

24. Ibid., 146–60.

25. Brendon, Press Barons, 113.

26. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 116.

27. Answers, 23 July 1892.

28. Ibid.

29. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 170–75. For Kennedy Jones’s recollections see Fleet Street and Downing Street (London: Hutchinson, 1920).

30. Robert Pierce, “Lord Northcliffe: Trans-Atlantic Influences,” Journalism Monographs 40 (August 1975): 13. This article gives a balanced view of Northcliffe’s journalistic “borrowings” of press innovations, technology, and talent from America and his own influence in return.

31. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 208.

32. Ibid., 186.

33. Hammerton, With Northcliffe in Meet Street, 162.

34. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 193.

35. Koss, Political Press, 1: 369.

36. Brendon, Press Barons, 114.

37. Kennedy Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Sheet, 142.

38. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 200.

39. Politics in Wartime (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 154. Northcliffe gave credit for the paragraph to Edmund Yates of the London World. Pound and Harmsworth Northcliffe, 65.

40. Brendon, Press Barons, 114.

41. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 260. Northcliffe has been given credit for various other publishing innovations. On the financial side, the Harmsworths began the trend of transforming private publishing empires into public companies. Other features Northcliffe at least helped popularize were the use of comic strips and the serial story.

42. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 219.

43. The Unionist (in favor of the maintenance of the Union with Ireland) and Conservative political labels were used interchangeably in this period.

44. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 220.

45. Ibid., 230–31.

46. Ibid., 254.

47. Pierce, “Northcliffe’s Trans-Atlantic Influences,” 18–23.

48. Ibid., 24.

49. Alfred Gollin, Proconsul in Politics: A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 575.

50. Esher to Maurice Brett, 29 October 1901, in Maurice Brett, ed., Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, 4 vols. (London: Ivor Nicholson, 1934, 1938), 1: 311. For Esher see Peter Fraser, Lord Esher: A Political Biography (London: Hart-Davis, McGibbon, 1973).

51. Koss, Political Press, 1: 368–69. This phrase was reputedly a play on the newspaper described in Thackeray’s Pendennis as “written by gentlemen for gentlemen.”

52. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 151–52.

53. This was published in 1894 as The Great War in England in 1897. For a survey of the popular invasion scare literature before the war, see I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

54. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 152.

55. Twells Brex, “Scaremongerings” from the Daily Mail 1896–1914 (London, 1915), 9; Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 232. Stevens died of enteric fever while covering the war.

56. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 250–51.

57. Clarke, Northcliffe in History, 23.

58. Richard Bourne, Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (London: Unwin, 1990), 30–31.

59. Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 252.

60. A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896–1914 (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1984), 89.

61. Balfour to Harmsworth, 7 May 1896, Northcliffe Add. Mss., 62153, BL.

62. The name is taken from a part of the coast near his favorite home ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface & Acknowledgments
• One. Introduction: Background, & Prelude to War
• Two. “A Boomerang Policy”: Censorship & Recruiting Battles, August to December 1914
• Three. “A Very Big and Difficult Thing”: Munitions & Coalition, January to June 1915
• Four. “A Very Hard Nut to Crack”: The Conscription Question, July to December 1915
• Five. “No More Shilly-Shallying”: Air Power and Conscription, January to June 1916
• Six. “Asquith’s Head on a Plate”: The Fall of Asquith & the Rise of Lloyd George, July to December 1916
• Seven. “To Tell the People of America the Truth”: The United States Enters the War, January to May 1917
• Eight. Deeds and Words: Chairman of the British War Mission to the United States, June to November 1917
• Nine. “Pegasus in Harness”: Politics & Propaganda, November 1917 to April 1918
• Ten. “Great Propaganda”: From War to Peace, May to November l918
• Eleven. The Huns Must Pay”: Politics & Peacemaking, November 1918 to june 1919
• Twelve. Conclusion: Politicians, the Press, & Propaganda
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index