![Crowds outside Buckingham Palace read the Evening Standard of Feb 6 1952](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/10/TELEMMGLPICT000379878082_17206110426920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwauLYewjGO21NF-o1gxbkUI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Kidnap, corruption, death – the wild birth of the British tabloids
The Newsmongers, a history of tabloid journalism by Terry Kirby, features plenty of strange figures, but some equally strange arguments too
![Crowds outside Buckingham Palace read the Evening Standard of Feb 6 1952](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/10/TELEMMGLPICT000379878082_17206110426920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwauLYewjGO21NF-o1gxbkUI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The tabloid, Terry Kirby explains, was born on January 1 1901, which fussy chronologists count as the first day of the 20th century. Alfred Harmsworth, still in his thirties and rich enough to have launched the Daily Mail in 1896, was invited by the American press baron Joseph Pulitzer to guest-edit The World, his mass-circulation New York paper, as the “newspaper of the future” for the day.
Harmsworth had proved the appeal of his ideas by publishing a weekly from 1889 called Answers to Correspondents. It focused on matters such as “How madmen write”, “How divers dress” and “A year only 87 days long”. I’d buy that. Another success of his was Comic Cuts, an illustrated magazine with the motto “Amusing without being vulgar”.
His newspaper of the future was constructed by folding the broadsheet in half and telling journalists to file nothing longer than 250 words. “Tabloid” had been used in the medical trade to mean a compressed tablet, but now Harmsworth declared in an editorial: “The World enters to-day upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.” A likely story. But no matter how fallacious the logic, the concept of the smaller format signalling juicier content gained ground.
Terry Kirby’s history of tabloid journalism, The Newsmongers, is more entertaining in its chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries than in its preliminary run through the larval stages of the press, or in following the 21st-century flutter into the candle flame. That’s because the newspapermen and -women in those middle two centuries were larger than life – indeed monstrous.
I wouldn’t have minded fuller treatment, for instance, of WT Stead, editor from 1883 to 1889 of the Pall Mall Gazette (tabloid in format). Kirby says that he “campaigned over moral issues such as child prostitution, which led to him being jailed for publishing an interview with a 16-year-old girl who offered to sell him her virginity”. I’m afraid it was worse than that. In a campaign in 1885 to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16, Stead had got hold of a 13-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong. He had her examined by a woman in a house of ill repute, chloroformed and sent to France.
![A woman reads the News of the World of August 31 1997](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/10/TELEMMGLPICT000001242872_17206107261010_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Her mother complained to the police and got her back after 11 weeks. Stead was arrested, and the reports of his trial attracted a huge readership, not only to the Pall Mall Gazette, but also to The Daily Telegraph, which gave over 54,000 words to reporting the Bow Street hearing and more than 100,000 words to the subsequent Old Bailey trial. The girl’s evidence of being examined “indecently” was reported in detail. Stead was sentenced for abduction and assault to three months in Holloway (not yet a woman-only prison). In prison, he later recalled, “I asked myself who was the man of most importance alive. I could only find one answer – the prisoner in this cell.” Ever after, on the anniversary of his jailing, Stead wore his prison uniform with its broad arrows. He even managed to die sensationally, aboard the Titanic.
Pursuing such “scandal and sensation” for a mass readership, as Kirby glosses “tabloid” avant la lettre, had helped to give The Daily Telegraph, as it boasted from 1876, “The largest circulation in the world”. (Oddly, the author seems to think that the Telegraph, founded in 1855, was around after Peterloo in 1819 as an “establishment-focused” paper.) From 1864, the Illustrated Police News had begun to supplant Victorian penny dreadfuls. In 1888, it reported the Whitechapel murders on its front page with a series of engraved scenes, including Annie Chapman’s face before and after death. It was this sort of paper that Dickens had in mind when, in Our Mutual Friend, he had Mrs Betty Higden declare: “I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy [an orphan boy] is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” We must not imagine that Victorians regarded newspapers as high-minded.
In the last part of The Newsmongers, edging into the present century, Kirby turns his narrative into an argument. I kept responding, “Yes, but.” He takes up the contention of Brian Cathcart, a founder of the pressure group Hacked Off: “Why is the United Kingdom in a mess? Our problem is the press… that has facilitated and concealed corruption.” It would, Cathcart went on, “take an act of great courage by the whole country to call it to account”.
![Protestors outside the Leveson Inquiry wear masks of Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron in 2012](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/10/TELEMMGLPICT000011123341_17206105980000_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwekapBZ1c_8650LP5YH00zA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
One attempt was perhaps the Leveson Inquiry. Kirby manages to make his account of this both dull and tendentious. “The judge was assisted by a number of advisors, including Shami Chakrabati, director of the civil-rights group Liberty,” he notes, and that’s the last we hear of her. Lady Chakrabarti, as she became when Jeremy Corbyn made her his only nomination for the Lords in August 2016, then held her own inquiry, into racism in the Labour party, and concluded that it was “not overrun by anti-Semitism”.
The truth is that rottenness in public life, from the MPs’ expenses scandal to practical wrongs such as withdrawal of landlines – the only connection to survive a power cut – is exposed by the press. But a bold indicator of which way the wind blows in Kirby’s mind is a cross-heading in capital letters that he supplies: “Despite the pleas for privacy from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the tabloids have continued to write about them extensively.” Where does one begin? The pleas for privacy were accompanied by full-volume look-at-me exposure on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show. Then there was the toe-curling account in the Duke’s memoir, Spare, of how he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub.
Only 12 years ago, Terry Kirby was writing blameless paragraphs in the Standard about how “supermodel daughter of kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst has become the new face of lingerie brand Myla”. Since then, he has followed a calling as a senior lecturer in journalism at Goldsmiths. He now seems to forget the importance of the freedom to write about anything legal, under a rule of law that is not oppressive.
The Newsmongers is published by Reaktion at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books