Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (26 April 1868 – 26 November 1940), was a leading British newspaper proprietor who owned Associated Newspapers Ltd. He is best known, like his brother Alfred Harmsworth, later Viscount Northcliffe, for the development of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Rothermere was a pioneer of popular tabloid journalism, and his descendants continue to control the Daily Mail and General Trust.
Two of Rothermere's three sons were killed in action during the First World War and in the 1930s, he advocated peaceful relations between Germany and the United Kingdom, and used his media influence to that end. He became known for his open support for fascism and praise for Nazi Germany and the British Union of Fascists, which contributed to the popularity of those views in the 1930s. After seeing his hopes dashed by the outbreak of the Second World War, he died in Bermuda.
Background Harmsworth was the second son of Alfred and Geraldine Harmsworth (née Maffett). His thirteen siblings included Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, Cecil Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth, Sir Leicester Harmsworth, 1st Baronet, and Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, 1st Baronet. Rothermere was an active member of the Sylvan Debating Club, founded by his father. He first attended as a visitor in 1882 and later served as treasurer.
He was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, which he left to become a clerk for the Board of Trade. In 1888 he joined his elder brother Alfred's newspaper company, and in 1894 he and his brother purchased the Evening News for £25,000.
Entry into Fleet Street In 1896 Harmsworth and his brother Alfred together founded the Daily Mail. In 1903 they launched the Daily Mirror. In 1910 Harmsworth bought the Glasgow Record and Mail, and in 1915 the Sunday Pictorial. By 1921 he was owner of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Pictorial, Glasgow Daily Record, Evening News, and Sunday Mail, and shared ownership of the company Associated Newspapers with his brother Alfred, who had been made Viscount Northcliffe in 1918. His greatest success came with the Daily Mirror, which had a circulation of three million by 1922.
Although one of the chief rivals of the Harmsworth newspapers was the Daily Express owned by Max Aitken (the future Lord Beaverbrook), in May 1913 Harmsworth went with Aitken on a lengthy business trip to western Canada. The trip marked the start of an odd alliance between Aitken and the Harmsworth family that would persist regardless of the rivalry between the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. When Aitken was raised to the peerage in 1917 as Baron Beaverbrook, Harmsworth, by then Baron Rothermere, served as one of his sponsors when he first entered the House of Lords. Aitken regarded him as the more relatable of the two brothers.
Grand Falls, Newfoundland In 1904, on behalf of his elder brother Alfred, Harmsworth travelled to Newfoundland with Mayson Beeton, son of Isabella Beeton, the author of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, to search for a supply of timber and a site to build a pulp and paper mill. They found a suitable site at Grand Falls, on the Exploits River, which had been named by John Cartwright in 1768. They bought the land and developed a company town there which became Grand Falls-Windsor.Address to Kiwanis and Rotary Club of Grand Falls-Windsor To harvest the timber, Harmsworth founded the Anglo-Newfoundland Corporation, which became one of the largest corporations in Newfoundland.
Aviation In 1903, the first flight took place, and the new technology of aviation was eagerly followed. Harmsworth was amongst those fascinated with aviation, and in 1906 came up with the idea of having the Harmsworth newspapers offer a prize of £1,000 to the first person to fly across the English Channel. He followed this challenge with another offering £10,000 for the first person to fly from London to Manchester.
Honours Harmsworth was created a baronet, of Horsey in the County of Norfolk, in 1910. In 1914 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Rothermere, of Hemsted in the County of Kent; in 1919 he was made Viscount Rothermere.
Public life The politician Rothermere was closest to before the First World War was Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1915, Rothermere wrote to Churchill asking him to promote one of his former reporters, Jack Kruse, to the rank of captain in the Royal Naval Division, a request that was granted. The ill-fated Dardanelles campaign, which Churchill had promoted, led to a break in their friendship. By the fall of 1915, the Battle of Gallipoli degenerated into a stalemate with the Allies unable to advance up the heights of Gallipoli while the Ottomans were unable to push the Allies back into the sea. Rothermere's brother Lord Northcliffe used his newspapers to document the failures of the Allies in the Dardanelles campaign, and demanded that the Allies leave Gallipoli. The defeat in the Dardanelles seriously damaged Churchill's reputation, and as Harmsworth supported his brother, his friendship with Churchill soured. However, Rothermere remained in contact with Churchill and employed him from time to time as a special writer on aviation for the Daily Mail.
For a time during the war, Rothermere served as President of the Air Council in the government of David Lloyd George. Rothermere proved to an inept politician whose background as a businessman with a dictatorial control of a press empire made him ill-suited to the cabinet, which required the ability to reach a consensus with other cabinet ministers. He was incapable of compromise, instead attempting to ram his proposals through and incessantly plotting against cabinet colleagues who disagreed with him. His main interest was in combining the Royal Flying Corps of the British Army with the Royal Naval Air Service to create a third service to be called the Royal Air Force. He was ejected from the cabinet after only five months. In 1921, he founded the Anti-Waste League to combat what he saw as excessive government spending.
Press baron When his elder brother died in 1922 without an heir, Harmsworth acquired his controlling interest in Associated Newspapers for £1.6 million, and the next year bought the Hulton newspaper chain, which gave him control of three national morning newspapers, three national Sunday newspapers, two London evening papers, four provincial daily newspapers, and three provincial Sunday newspapers. To pay the death duties on Northcliffe's estate, Rothermere sold the Associated Press and The Times. Rothermere was the third richest man in Britain with a fortune in 1922 worth £780 million. One contemporary who knew him called him "a proud, gruff captain of industry" with a tendency to be rude.
Rothermere had a fundamentally elitist conception of politics, believing that the natural leaders of Britain were upper class men like himself. He strongly disapproved of the decision to grant women over the age of 30 the right to vote, and with the end of the franchise requirements that had disenfranchised lower-class men; a Daily Mail leader declared: "[Q]uite a few people now possess the vote who ought never to have been given it". He started to lose faith in democracy, fearing that with the extended franchise, the rise of the Labour Party that had begun with the 1918 election might culminate in the formation of a hitherto unthinkable Labour government. As Collin Brooks, the journalist whom Rothermere had appointed as his official biographer, wrote: "His prevailing mood was politically one of the deepest pessimism and personally of almost uproarious social mirth. He was convinced that Britain had entered a phase of decline, had lost her old militant virtues, and in her softness, was lusting after strange idols of pacifism, nationalisation, and everything which would sap self-reliance... His family had at one time all been nominal Liberals, but he among them was a temperamental Tory of the Johnsonian school".
Two of Rothermere's sons died as a result of their service in the First World War. Vere Harmsworth served in the Royal Naval Division and was killed in action on 16 November 1916 during the Second Battle of Cambrai. Vyvyan Harmsworth died in 1918 of wounds he had taken in 1916. To add to his stress, Rothermere's marriage broke down as his wife, Lillian, had an affair with his younger brother, St. John. Britain's strict divorce laws, which were not relaxed until 1967, would have required him to prove his wife's adultery in court to secure a dissolution of the marriage, and he refused to admit publicly to having been cuckolded. He became lonely and unhappy. He was a womaniser whose relationships with his mistresses, until 1927, were very brief, as he rapidly lost interest once he had taken his new conquest to bed. He had a tendency to ennui, walking the streets of London every morning looking for something new, and when he was bored with London, taking extensive foreign trips. Addison argued that Rothermere was a psychologically troubled man with his maniacal mood swings; an inability to have lasting relationships; and a tendency towards hysteria.
Rothermere's political pessimism led him to fear imminent economic as well as political collapse. In November 1921, he wrote to Beaverbrook: "My own opinion is that we are on the threshold of the world slump. In its momentous consequences it is I am sure going to dwarf even the Great War. In the economic collapse of Russia, Austria, Hungary, the Balkan states, Turkey, Europe, and Asia-and the approaching collapse of Germany we see steadily being unfolded before our eyes a drama fraught with more perilous consequences for the human race than anything recorded in history". He had frequent night-time anxiety attacks, fearing that his wealth (he was one of the richest men in Britain) would diminish overnight, and he would telephone his corporate officer, Sir George Sutton, to demand information about his precise net worth. Any fall in the stock-market prices in the city or reports of economic trouble anywhere in the world caused him to demand immediate reassurances that steps were being taken to save his fortune. Sutton would assure him that he was taking such steps and that his fortune was secure, and then go back to sleep.
The Rothermere newspapers promoted a narrative of 'national degeneration'. A typical story in the Evening Standard, headlined in capital letters "WHITE GIRLS 'HYPNOTISED' BY YELLOW MEN", recounted what it called the "alarming facts" of London's Chinatown, warning in lurid detail of "the degradation of young white girls" at the hands of Chinese men: "Englishwomen are selling themselves to Chinamen; they are seeking out Asiatics in the streets where before the war no white women walked. The evil is baffling to the police and social workers. Women who have been 'rescued' and given a fresh start have relapsed and returned to their foreign masters, and have sunk even lower than before. The unmarried mother with a half-caste child is only one of the several problems arising. And obviously this cheapening of the white women among men who go down to the sea in ships must have reactions in the East and in every part of the world where colored and white races dwell side by side". The British historian Raphael Samuel noted that this story was typical of the "ever racist" Rothermere newspapers, which often painted a picture of a demonic Other posing an existential threat to a noble, but failing Britain.