To the Niminy Piminy

"The success of the London Daily Mirror," lamented the staid London Economist, "is a sore reflection upon a democracy, sometimes called educated, that prefers its information potted, pictorial, and spiced with sex and sensation." Nevertheless, just that style of journalism has made the Mirror the biggest daily in the world (circ. 4,432,700). Last week 40-year-old Mirror Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp ("If you don't like the Mirror, you don't like the human race") told the erratic success story of the paper in a book, Publish and Be Damned!, as irreverent and racy as the Mirror itself. The book's aggressive theme: "The London press is too niminy piminy."

For the Ladies. The Mirror itself was as niminy piminy as it could be when it was founded in 1903 by the late great Press Lord Northcliffe as "a newspaper for gentlewomen, produced by ladies of breeding." After less than a year, with its circulation barely at 25,000, Northcliffe decided the paper was a "mad frolic" because "women can't write, and don't want to read." He ordered his editor to fire the staff and start over again, remaking the Mirror as Britain's first popular picture daily. Getting rid of the women, said one of Northcliffe's editors, "was a horrid experience--like drowning kittens. They begged to be allowed to stay. They left little presents on my desk, waylaid me tearfully in the corridors." But the change worked. By 1914, when Northcliffe took vigorous personal control of the London Times (TIME, May 19, 1952) and sold the Mirror to his brother, Lord Rothermere, circulation was more than 1,000,000.

Rothermere quickly became outraged by the Mirror's sex and sensation, changed its style. He set the Mirror out on a dull and endless campaign against national "Squandermania," tried to capture readers with a series of giveaways and contests. "In a decade of brashness," says Historian Cudlipp, "the Mirror offered gentility." Rothermere also made some wrong guesses in politics, spoke kindly of Hitler, Mussolini, and even of Britain's home-grown Fascist Oswald Mosley. Gradually the paper lost readers, and in 1931 Rothermere finally stepped out, selling his shares on the open market. The Mirror was swiftly transformed. Readers accustomed to seeing features about swans on the Thames awoke one morning and found such inch-high headlines blanketing the front page as MOTHER SLAYS BABE IN WOODS TO MAKE WAY FOR LOVER.

The Plank. The man most responsible for the explosive change was Harry Guy Bartholomew, "brilliant, truculent, mercurial, [whose] normal means of communication with his staff was the hand grenade; if urgent, the thunderbolt." "Bart," who habitually pushed his Rolls-Royce at 70 m.p.h., drove his staff just as hard. Prankishly, he liked to take visitors on a tour of the city room, bang an editor over the head with an eight-foot plank, then rock with laughter when his guests found that the plank was made of feather-light balsa wood. On occasion, the Mirror used the slogan, "All the News You Want to Know and Which Nobody Else Will Tell You," and the paper's book column boasted: "There is no need to waste time on a boring book if you follow our selections."

Bart's new editorial diet paid off. But though the paper went forward, it traveled through hot water. During World War II, the Mirror hammered the government so fiercely that Prime Minister Churchill charged the Mirror was like a "very clever fifth column" that had only "hatred and malice toward the government." Members of Parliament threatened to suppress the Mirror and investigated the Mirror's ownership to find out who controlled the paper, suspecting German money might be behind it. (Actually, the Mirror is owned by 10,300 stockholders, with no single controlling interest.)

The People. The Mirror weathered the crises, moved closer and closer toward the Labor Party. In 1945 it helped push Labor into power. By 1948 the Mirror passed Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express, added to its logotype: THE BIGGEST DAILY ON EARTH. FORWARD WITH THE PEOPLE. Once the Labor Party was entrenched in power, the Mirror screamed "Attlee must go," bitterly attacked the party it had supported for losing touch with "the people." But in 1951 it rallied to Attlee and the Labor Party again, on election day even ran a picture of Churchill and Attlee alongside a drawing of a pistol ("Whose Finger Do You Want on the Trigger?"). Churchill promptly charged the paper had called him a warmonger, sued for libel and won a $3,500 settlement plus a public apology. But the Mirror, at the peak of its success, had even more serious trouble. Bart was restive working with the paper's second-in-command, Cecil Harmsworth King, Lord Northcliffe's nephew. Irascible as ever, more than a year ago Bart stormed into a board meeting that had questioned his authority, ended up leaving the paper he had built and retiring.

Under its present boss, Cecil King, Fleet Streeters expect the Mirror to move slowly toward the right without abandoning any of its moneymaking, cheeky ways. Oxford-educated Editorial Chairman King, 52, is at home with the Mirror's sensational journalism, but, like his uncle Lord Northcliffe and his predecessor Bart, he has learned another lesson from the Mirror's success: the paper moves with the people, and in Britain, the people have been moving right.

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