The Press: Labor’s Herald

Clem Attlee waved his honorary union card and assured the grinning pressmen: “It’s O.K.” Then the Prime Minister pushed a little button, and the presses at Odhams’ , started to roll. The London Daily Herald (circ. 2,131,824), British Labor’s official newspaper, was 10,000 issues old.

Earlier that night, at the Albert Hall, Reader Attlee had told Editor Percy Cudlipp and 6,000 Laborites why he liked the Herald. Said Attlee: “We do not want a paper like those we see in some countries which just express the views of the government [or] a single man. . . . We want —and we have got—a paper that, while giving general support to our movement, allows for the expression of other points of view.”

Editor Cudlipp has steered a cautious course between the conflicting demands of popular taste and party tactics. Today the Herald prints very few stories of sex and adventure but more than ardent Laborites think it should; it also prints more stories about Labor and the trade unions than readers of the rival Daily Mail and Express want to labor through. Though duller than its Fleet Street rivals, the Herald is London’s third largest daily paper, and the only one which steadily supports Labor (it has to).

Miracle of Fleet Street. The Herald was born in a printers’ strike in 1911, when the printers took their case to the public in a four-page sheet (price: one halfpenny). Three months later, when the printers won their demands and returned to their own papers, they gave up the Daily Herald and its 20,000 readers.

A year later, Socialist Editor George Lansbury revived the paper. At first, unpaid volunteers wrote the stories. Lord Northcliffe, amazed at the Herald’s shoestring survival, dubbed it “the Miracle of Fleet Street.”

In World War I, when the Herald temporarily turned into a weekly, its contributors included George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. Later H.G. Wells covered politics, and Edgar Wallace, crime. (Once, when Contributor G. K. Chesterton was searching for the editor’s office, an employee observed: “You seem to have lost your way.” Beamed Chesterton: “We have all lost our way.”)

In 1922, the Trades Union Congress and the Labor Party took over the paper —but couldn’t make ends meet. Capitalists Beaverbrook and Rothermere knew better than the Herald’s proletarian-hearted editors what the British workingman wanted to read.

Profitable Paradox. In 1929, T.U.C.’s Ernie Bevin swung the deal that made the Herald the profitable paradox it is today. Bevin sold a 51% interest to Odhams’ Press, run by a business wizard named Julius Salter Elias (later Lord Southwood). Elias was willing to let Labor tell him how to sell Socialism, as long as he could tell Labor how to sell papers.

In a fortnight, Herald circulation zoomed from 250,000 to 1,000,000. Elias’ giveaway offers of pots & pans, washing machines and the complete works of Charles Dickens started the most insanely expensive circulation war that Britain had ever seen. In 1933, the Herald was the first London daily to hit the two-million mark.

Labor critics complained that the only way to get a political message into the jazzed-up Herald was to etch it on the back of a bathing beauty. A motion that the Herald “no longer deserves support as a Labor paper” became a tradition of party congresses. In 1940, after a tug of war between Socialists and circulation-builders, Editor Francis Williams resigned and Deputy Editor Cudlipp took over.

Left-Wing Cad. Leisurely, precise Percy Cudlipp is a first-rate political journalist and a competent, quick-minded editor. Cudlipp sits in with Labor M.P.s on party policy debates, and must answer the closed-door criticisms of his readers at the Labor Party Congress each year. The Herald lambasted Fuel Minister Shinwell in last year’s coal crisis, often prints signed critical articles by Labor backbenchers.

Now 43, Editor Cudlipp was an office boy on a Welsh paper at 14, a London theater critic at 20. When Beaverbrook made him boss of his Evening Standard at 27, Cudlipp became Fleet Street’s youngest editor.* Leaving the Beaver for the “politically more congenial” Herald in 1938, Cudlipp, an amateur versifier, dashed off his own epitaph: “One satisfaction I have had, and this will be eternal; I may become a left-wing cad, but I once ran a high-class journal.”

* His youngest brother Hugh later beat him by becoming editor of the Sunday Pictorial at 26.