“And if you’re not very careful, young man, he may edit Page Four!”
Young offered me a cold hand, and there was not a benediction in his glance. I was put under his orders as a writer, as heir presumptive to his throne. As it happened, we became good friends, and he had no grudge against me when, some months later, he vacated the chair in my favor and went to Ireland for The Daily Mail, to collect material for his brilliant essays on “Ireland at the Crossroads.”
So there I was, in the Harmsworth régime, which has made many men, and broken others. It was the great school of the new journalism, which was very new in England of those days, and mainly inspired by the powerful, brilliant, erratic, and whimsical genius of Alfred Harmsworth himself.
I joined his staff at the end of the Boer War period, when there was a brilliant group of men on The Daily Mail, such as Charles Hands, Edgar Wallace, H. W. Wilson, Holt White, and Filson Young. The editor was “Tom” Marlowe, still by a miracle in that position, which he kept through years of turbulence and change, by carrying out with unfaltering hesitation every wish and whimsey of The Chief, and by a sense of humor which never betrayed him into regarding any internal convulsion, revolution, or hysteria of The Daily Mail system as more than the latest phase in an ever-changing game. Men might come, and men might go, but Marlowe remained forever, bluff, smiling, imperturbable, and kind.
Above him in power of direction, dynamic energy, and financial authority, was Kennedy Jones, whom all men feared and many hated. He had a ruthless brutality of speech and action which Harmsworth, more human, more generous, and less cruel (though he had a strain of cruelty), found immensely helpful in running an organization which could not succeed on sentiment or brotherly love. Kennedy Jones would break a man as soon as look at him, if he made a mistake “letting down” the paper, if he earned more money for a job which could be done for less by a younger man, if he showed signs of getting tired. That was his deliberate policy as a “strong man” out to win at any price, but, as in most men of the kind, there lay beneath his ruthlessness a substratum of human quality which occasionally revealed itself in friendly action. He had a cynical honesty of outlook on life, which gave his conversation at times the hard sparkle of wit and the bitter spice of truth. Beyond any doubt, the enormous success of the Northcliffe press, as it was afterward called, owed a great deal to the business genius of this man.
Alfred Harmsworth himself provided the ideas, the policy, the spirit of the machine. He was the enthusiast, the explorer, and the adventurer, with the world’s news as his uncharted seas. He had only one test of what was good to print, “Does this interest Me?” As he was interested, with the passionate curiosity of a small boy who asks continually “How?” and “Why?”, in all the elementary aspects of human life, in its romances and discoveries, its new toys and new fads, its tragedies and comedies of the more obvious kind, its melodramas and amusements and personalities, that test was not narrow or one-eyed. The legend grew that Harmsworth, afterward Northcliffe, had an uncanny sense of public opinion, and, with his ear to the ground, knew from afar what the people wanted, and gave it to them. But, in my judgment, he had none of that subtlety of mind and vision. He had a boyish simplicity, overlaid by a little cunning and craft. It was not what the public wanted that was his guiding rule. It was what he wanted. His luck and genius lay in the combination of qualities which made him typical to a supreme degree of the average man, as produced by the triviality, the restlessness, the craving for sensation, the desire to escape from boredom, the impatience with the length and dullness and difficulty of life and learning, the habit of taking short cuts to knowledge and judgment, which characterized that great middle-class public of the world before the war.
One method by which Harmsworth impressed his own views and character on the staff and paper was to hold a daily conference in The Daily Mail office, which all editors, sub-editors, reporters, special correspondents, and glorified office boys were expected to attend. Freedom of speech was granted, and free discussion invited, without distinction of rank. The man who put a good idea into the pool was rewarded by Harmsworth’s enthusiastic approbation, while he himself criticized that day’s paper, pointed out its defects, praised some article which had caught his fancy, and discussed the leading matter for next day’s paper. Cigarettes and cigars lay ready to the hand. Tea was served, daintily. Laughter and jokes brightened this daily rendezvous, and Harmsworth, at these times, in those early days, was at his best—easy, boyish, captivating, to some extent inspiring. But it was an inspiration in the triviality of thought, in the lighter side of the Puppet Show. Never once did I hear Harmsworth utter one serious commentary on life, or any word approaching nobility of thought, or any hint of some deep purpose behind this engine which he was driving with such splendid zest in its power and efficiency. On the other hand, I never heard him say a base word or utter an unclean or vicious thought.
He was very generous at times to those who served him. I know one man who approached him for a loan of £100.
He was shocked at the idea.