First Lord of the Press

Out of the dust of battle in the world's most competitive newspaper arena last week rose a new No. 1 British press lord: Cecil Harmsworth King, 54, big (6 ft. 4 in.), pink-faced boss of the world's biggest daily, London's tabloid Daily Mirror (circ. 4,725,122). King, still without a peerage, had become a publisher without a peer by snapping up three Glasgow papers from Lord Kemsley. With the purchase, King's Daily Mirror-Sunday Pictorial group* shot past the lordly Rothermere and Beaverbrook domains to command 18.2% of Britain's daily newspaper circulation of 32 million.

King's victory reflected (and bolstered) the ever-growing popularity of Britain's sensational "popular" press (TIME, Aug.

22). Yet, though his loudmouthed tabloids spiel sex, crime and the workingman's cause, Board Chairman King is a softspoken, curried product of Winchester and Oxford, who backs a highbrow literary monthly (The London Magazine}, functions efficiently in a shooting box in Scotland, collects Georgian silver, crystal and Chinese porcelain. A nephew of famed Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth), granddaddy of the British popular press, and his brother Lord Rothermere, King inherited brains and ambition as well as influence. He has worked in almost every kind of job on both the editorial and business sides, and taken a major hand in developing the Mirror's own formula of bosom-and-barricades journalism.

Forty Nude Models. King's plans for Glasgow readers took shape behind the big walnut desk in London's Geraldine House (named for his mother), from which he runs, among other things, paper mills in Canada, a newspaper chain in Africa and a string of radio and TV stations in Australia. "We will not run the Glasgow papers from London," he said. "They'll be run from Glasgow for the Scots. [But] we're going to brighten them. The Glasgow Daily Record, a tabloid like the Mirror, will be run like the Mirror with our best features, including our comic strips." Promptly the Record mirrored the Mirror. It busted out all over with cuts of British Star Diana Dors and the American Jane Russell; Columnist Donald Zee lectured movie queens (with pictures) about displaying too much cleavage before the Queen. An apt daughter, the new Record did its gay old mother proud with an inspired blend of sex and labor; a report of how 40 nude models who pose in Scottish art colleges had banded together to demand more pay.

"Sorry, Sir." In addition to his other Glasgow acquisitions, the Sunday Mail and the Evening News ("This is mainly an experiment--we don't know much about evening papers"), King made a deal to have the huge Kemsley plant in Manchester print 1,000,000 copies of the Mirror and 1,500,000 copies of the Sunday Pictorial (circ. 5,466,255). "We've been under a handicap," explained King, "by printing only in London while others have printed in both London and Manchester. We have had to close out our northern copies early." On the way up, Cecil King passed another press lord. Lord Kemsley, 72, once head of the largest press empire in Europe, not only let all three Glasgow papers go but also sold his Manchester Daily Dispatch (to the Liberal national daily, the News Chronicle}, and folded one of his Sunday papers, the famed old Sunday Chronicle, whose bylines have included H. G.

Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill. Oldtimers bitterly blamed the shrinkage of the Kemsley empire on uninspired management and unbudging conservatism both in politics and news treatment (Kemsley demands "clean crime, not sordid crime"). Newsmen especially resented how Kemsley shut down the Sunday Chronicle without an advance word to his staff. One reporter was phoning in a football story when the operator cut him off in the middle: "Sorry, sir, the paper has been discontinued." Left March. The staunch Tory politics of the Kemsley Glasgow papers will veer left of center under New Owner King, who considers himself an independent liberal. "That means I can be any thing I want," he explains candidly. "The Mirror is leftish, of course, but we've been moving right for the past two years.

That's because the country has been moving right. The standard of living is higher, and the worker now likes to consider himself middle class." Publisher King admits frankly that he does not consider politics his main end; what he wants is to keep growing bigger.

"Greedy labor unions and inept management are driving other newspapers out of business," he says. "I hope they don't, really, because I like to see variety. But one thing I know. The Mirror will flourish. And I shan't rest until the Pictorial overtakes the News of the World [the Sunday paper which, at 7,971,000 has the highest circulation on earth]. We won't be buying anything else for a while, though. We'll have to digest this lot before we look for our next meal."

* Though ownership of Mirror stock is widely scattered, King holds control through his own bloc, probably the second largest, plus the proxy of the paper's largest single shareholder, Multimillionaire Shipowner Sir John Reeves Ellerman.

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