Abstract
Rupert Murdoch has made a career out of being an iconoclast, but he left his most extreme act of vandalism until he was over the age of 80. In July 2011, shaken and shamed by the phone-hacking scandal, he announced the closure of the News of the World, a Sunday newspaper published continuously for nearly 170 years. During the 20th century it had developed into a national institution, an integral feature of the British weekend, with a circulation at its peak of nearly eight-and-a-half million.
Two of the 15 academics who have contributed to this illuminating study quote George Orwell's observation in his 1946 essay, The Decline of the English Murder: “It is Sunday afternoon before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose and open the News of the World.” Stafford Somerfield, editor during the 1960s, endorsed that cosy image, declaring that his paper was “as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding”.
In truth, though, the icon had been fading for some time before Murdoch took the axe to it. The paper's traditional formula of coy smut – carefully bowdlerised reports of juicy divorces and clergymen having their way with choirboys – had become outdated by the late 20th century, to be replaced by intrusive exposure of the private lives of celebrities. With circulation declining remorselessly, desperate measures were called for to keep it ahead of its competitors, now mining the same seam. The new technology that allowed reporters direct access to victims' phones and secrets became an indispensable tool of the trade – and the instrument of the News of the World's demise.
Entering the market in 1843 as one of a growing number of titles created chiefly to serve the newly literate working class, the paper always maintained a distinctive quality. In 1861, it declined to take part in a price war when its main rivals halved their price from twopence to one penny. This resulted in a loss of circulation but it remained afloat until the price was eventually reduced in 1880. The climb to its dominant position in the Sunday market began in 1891, when the founding family, the Bells, sold out to the Carrs, owners of the Cardiff-based Western Mail. The 24-year-old Emsley Carr, nephew of the chief proprietor, was installed as editor and remained in post until shortly before his death 50 years later. During his tenure the paper's circulation grew from little more than 50,000 to over four million – and doubled that figure in the decade following his death. The winning formula, as pithily described by Somerfield, was “sex, crime, beer and cricket in the summer, football in the winter”.
In one of the book's most absorbing chapters, Alison Oram of Leeds Beckett University puts flesh on that bare outline: “The News of the World gained notoriety for salaciousness in the first half of the 20th century primarily through its court reporting … and its wider coverage and more detailed reporting of sexual crime and immorality than other papers.” She notes, too, that the paper was “adept at promising titillation while avoiding offence to its audience and advertisers”.
Her chapter, entitled Woman As Husband, focuses on one particular form of titillation that it returned to time and time again. That title comes from a 1912 headline of a story about two women whose “bold escapade” was to live together in Chiswick as husband and wife. The husband had been employed as a plumber's mate, “masquerading” (the paper's favoured term for such behaviour) as a man. “No one ever suspected me,” she affirmed. “I even played football with men and went rowing on the Thames.” Another report, in 1929, told the story of William Holton, discovered to be a woman only when admitted to a poor law hospital. She had been living for some years with a woman who claimed she had never known that her partner was not a man, and even believed her to be the father of one of her children.
With the change in the moral climate that began in the swinging 1960s, such stories scored lower and lower on the titillation index. In 1960 Somerfield took over as editor from Reg Cudlipp and began the switch to celebrity journalism by serialising the racy memoirs of Diana Dors, the actress, and later those of Christine Keeler, the femme fatale of the Profumo scandal. This kept the circulation fairly stable during his editorship, at around six million, but the paper was suffering from lax management, with the feuding Carr family seemingly keener to preserve the social perks that went with proprietorship than to ensure the firm remained solvent. That cleared the way for Murdoch to swoop, laying the foundation of his empire.
This authoritative set of essays, packed with information and insight, should – were it more reasonably priced – find a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the history of our disreputable trade.