Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, was the most powerful press baron in British history, the man against whom all future great press magnates such as Lord Beaverbrook, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch must be judged. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War, Northcliffe owned no less than 40% of the British press by circulation, an extraordinary amount never seen before or since. His decisions moulded opinions, started fashions, and made and broke governments.
With the permission of the Harmsworth family, I became the first biographer to be allowed totally free access to Lord Northcliffe’s massive private archive since his official biographers seventy years ago, where I uncovered an extraordinary story that they refused to tell, not least about his private life and his string of mistresses. So who was this figure who came from almost nothing to the position where he helped decide the destiny of the largest empire the world has ever seen?
Alfred Harmsworth was born in Dublin in Ireland, the son of an impoverished schoolteacher who later moved to London to be become barrister, but who then took to drink. He was the eldest of eleven children, and because of his father’s drinking the family was held together by its matriarch, Geraldine, who Alfred worshipped all his life. The family were so poor that at one point Geraldine had – ironically enough as it turned out - to wrap the youngest of her babies in newspapers to keep them warm.
Alfred became fascinated by journalism as a schoolboy in St John’s Wood, London, where he edited his school magazine and started to use eye-catching headlines and short, punchy paragraphs. He ignored his father’s wish for him to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead headed to Fleet Street, the centre of Victorian journalism, where he wrote on such totally random subjects as “Some Curious Butterflies” and “Organ-Grinders and Their Earnings” for any paper that would hire him.
He worked very hard and by the age of twenty had earned enough money, and made enough wealthy contacts, to start his own magazine, entitled Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject Under the Sun. Success came quickly, and in only four years his Amalgamated Press was selling more than a million papers a week as he expended his empire to include popular magazines such as Comic Cuts, Boys’ Own Journal and Forget-Me-Not: a Pictorial Journal for The Home. These fed the desire for knowledge and entertainment of a newly-literate generation who had been taught to read by Britain’s Education Act of 1870. Harmsworth had spotted a huge new audience of hard-working white-collar, commuting middle classes, clerks and City workers.
Using the capital raised from his magazines, in 1896 Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail, which he dubbed the “Penny Newspaper for One Halfpenny.” It was aimed squarely at the ordinary reader, and he said it would “take as much care making things plain to the mill-girl as The Times did to the clubman”. Nothing was left to chance, and he insisted before it launched that his staff produce no fewer than sixty dummy editions. Across south-east England, railway bridges were plastered with advertisements for it. The paper was an instant success, and by 1899 was selling over a million copies a day.
Harmsworth defined news as “anything out of the ordinary”, concentrating on short paragraphs which explained subjects clearly and concisely. “The three things that are always news are health things, sex things and money things,” he told his staff. On another occasion he wrote that “There is a great art in feeling the pulse of the people.” Nor did he care that liberals, intellectuals and prigs despised the paper. “The Daily Mail is the best-hated paper in the world,” he said. “On the day it ceases to be, I’ll change my staff.” Another belief of his was that “What people try to get into papers is seldom news, but what they try to keep out nearly always is.”
In 1903, Harmsworth launched the Daily Mirror, which he dubbed “the First Daily Newspaper for Gentlewomen”. Two years later he bought Britain’s oldest surviving Sunday paper, The Observer, which was going bankrupt but which thanks to him still exists today, as does the Mirror. In 1905, he and his brother and business partner Harold Harmsworth (later Lord Rothermere) also founded a completely new town in Newfoundland, Canada. Grand Falls had well-designed houses, a church, sports teams and an arts centre. Most importantly, it had the largest paper mill in the world, using wood from a surrounding area they owned that was larger than the English counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent combined.

In March 1908, by which time he had been elevated to the peerage as Lord Northcliffe, Alfred pulled off his next great business coup when paid £320,000 in cash to buy The Times, the most prestigious newspaper in the world. He managed to snatch it from under the nose of a competitor by means that were sneaky but entirely legal.
Never had one person controlled so much newsprint, and had so much influence over what millions of Britons read and thought. He was widely nicknamed “The Napoleon of Fleet Street” although his employees always called him ‘The Chief’. They loved the way that he greatly increased journalists’ pay, stuck by them in disputes with politicians and the Establishment, and cared more about his readers than he did about the group of powerful new friends who now flocked to him.
The Times had nearly gone bankrupt and there were fears that Northcliffe would turn it into a threepenny version of the Daily Mail. Instead he dropped the Times’s cover price which greatly increased its circulation, bought state-of-the-art printing presses, improved its layout, and undertook to respect the independence of what he called the “Old Gang” of its editorial staff.
Within three years, however, he was imposing his views on The Times in much the same way as all his other papers, but they were views that were substantially correct. Northcliffe foresaw with clear precision the threat that Wilhelmine Germany posed to the balance of power in Europe. He was regularly denounced in both Britain and Germany as an anti-German scaremonger and warmonger, but events were to prove him right.
Once the First World War had started, Northcliffe denounced his friend Winston Churchill’s expedition to Gallipoli, ardently argued for mass compulsory conscription and the rationing of food, and came to recognise early on that the prime minister Herbert Asquith was utterly inadequate as a war leader.
In the bravest moment of his life, Northcliffe personally penned a leader in the Daily Mail in May 1915 that denounced Lord Kitchener, the secretary for war, over the shortage of shells on the Western Front, which led to the Daily Mail being burned on the floor of the Stock Exchange, but which also helped to form a Liberal-Conservative coalition. When Asquith was finally forced from office in December 1916, the Daily Mail celebrated with the front page headline “The Passing of the Failures”, complete with large photographs of departing ministers.
In 1917 Northcliffe was sent by David Lloyd George to the United States to run Britain’s War Mission there, and to propagandize the Allied cause. In 1918 he was made Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. For these and many other contributions, the Australian prime minister William Hughes stated that Northcliffe was “one of the great forces for making for victory during the war”. The ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed, saying in his exile in Holland, “Ach, diese Propaganda von Northcliffe! Es war kolossal,” whereupon the Kaiser’s equerry added: “If we had had a Northcliffe we could have won the war. Was für ein Mensch!”
Northcliffe was not a nice man; he disliked Scotsman and was a virulent anti-Semite. He was occasionally cruel to his long-suffering wife Mary, at one point even booking adjoining boxes at the Royal Opera House for her and his leading mistress Kathleen Wrohan. In my book, I establish that Wrohan was not the mother of the three children she claimed were hers and Northcliffe’s, because the descendants do not share the DNA of either of them. Whether he knew that they were adopted is unknown, but she stayed away from him in the periods that he would have noticed that she was not pregnant.
In 1922 Northcliffe went mad and died from malignant endocarditis, although at the time many thought it was syphilis that killed him. My book examines the illness, and a psychosis under which he became convinced that the Germans were trying to murder him with poisoned ice cream, he brandished a pistol at his staff, and he informed anyone who would listen at Boulogne railway station that God was a sodomite. His last words were perfectly sane though: “Give a kiss and my love to Mother, and tell her she is the only one.”

Andrew Roberts, professor of history at King's College London, is best-selling biographer of Napoleon and Churchill. His new book, The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe, Britain’s Greatest Press Baron is published with Simon & Schuster.