The Man In the Mirror

Behind London's Fleet Street, off bombed-out Fetter Lane, stands a terraced architectural absurdity known as Geraldine House. It is the home of the world's first great tabloid--and still its biggest. Every weekday, 3,700,954 London Daily Mirrors pour from the presses of Geraldine House; every weekend they print 4,006,241 Sunday Pictorials. Each Mirror reflects the tabloid wizardry of Humpty-Dumptyish Harry Guy Bartholomew, who is as retiring as his paper is blatant.

One reason little "Mister Bart" sells more daily papers than anybody else in Britain (except Beaverbrook's Daily Express) is that his political acumen has made the independent Mirror the country's most sensitive barometer of the political weather. Sometimes it also helps to make the weather. A week before the 1945 election, the Mirror demanded that Britain "turn the Tories out." Then the paper supported Labor. Last July, Mister Bart spotted storm clouds ahead, for Labor and the Mirror cried: "Attlee must go."

Last week, as the Labor Government rocked in the wake of the municipal elections (see FOREIGN NEWS), the Mirror editorialized: "Although the country . . . may still be behind Labor, it is not going to be content unless . . . the Cabinet is alive to the necessities of the time and the temper of the people. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!"

Something for Everybody. The shopgirls and workmen who comprise most of the Mirror's audience get more than politics for their British penny. Says Mister Bart: "There's something for nearly everybody." The somethings rarely include straight news. The accent is on short, spicy stories on crime, tragedy and sex, eye-catching headlines (HE DIED AS THEY DANCED UNDER THE STARS), lively photographs, a caustic daily column by "Cassandra" (William Connor), and comics, ranging from the Mirror's own stripteasing Jane (TIME, Aug. 25) to action-packed Buck Ryan.

Once, asked to omit stories exploiting the grief of bereaved families, the Mirror declined in terms that capsuled the Bartholomew credo: "Are editors to be asked to say that this or that is not nice news? ... A news editor with that type of mind would be like a general with a conscientious objection to killing. . . . The London press is already too niminy piminy." When other British national papers were niminy piminy about the story of Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson, the Mirror broke it.*

Clothes for Jane. Mister Bart joined the Mirror shortly after the late Lord Northcliffe founded it in 1903; Northcliffe turned the paper over to his brother, the late Lord Rothermere, who moved out in 1931. Who now owns a controlling interest in the Mirror is Fleet Street's biggest mystery. But the board of directors and thousands of stockholders are quite satisfied to let Bartholomew, chairman of the Mirror and Pictorial, run both papers as long as they make fat profits (net for their last fiscal years: -L-535,111). Now 64, he has run the Mirror since 1931, built it up from a circulation of only 800,000. As if this were not enough to compensate for an inferiority complex, self-made Mister Bart bought himself the biggest Rolls Royce in Fleet Street, still likes to burn up the road ("I've done 97"). He works an 8:30 to 5:30 day, rarely sees the Mirror until next morning. But sometimes he pops in late at night when the presses are running and rips the paper apart if he doesn't like it. Never a reporter, Bartholomew started out in the Mirror's engraving department, became art editor, co-invented a system of cable transmission of photographs, has immense technical knowledge of pictures and makeup.

To find out what his readers want, Mister Bart occasionally does a bit of pub-crawling. This has resulted in a New Look for Jane. After enduring several cold winters in bra and panties (or less), she has been more modestly clad; Bartholomew, impressed by the Mirror's political weathermaking, thinks her old near-nudeness "no longer seems right in a paper which people are taking seriously."

* It had already been broken in the U.S.--and in uncensored copies that reached British subscribers--by TIME.

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